The Chinese initial public offering market : underpricing, duration to listing and hot issue cycles

This thesis conducts three empirical studies on the Chinese A-share initial public offering (IPO) market, specifically, underpricing and short-run underperformance, duration from offering to listing and hot and cold issuing cycles. Before the empirical analysis, the literature is reviewed associated with these three topics. In addition, this thesis presents an overview of the Chinese IPO market which is found to undergo an experiment period from 1984 to 1990, a transition period from 1991 to 1993 and finally steps into a relatively mature stage from 1994. The issuing systems, allocation mechanisms, pricing methods, structure of shareholders are also discussed. The first empirical study analyses underpricing and short-run underperformance of the Chinese A-share IPOs from Mar, 2001 to 2005 when the Approval System is adopted. We find the market adjusted first-day returns average at 93.49% during this period. Then we explore why Chinese IPOs are underpriced so much. The influences of inequality of IPO demand and supply, allocation mechanisms, structure of shareholders, duration to listing and underwriters are discussed respectively. Based on the discussion, we construct an ordinary least squares regression model and find that the underpricing is positively related to this IPO’s turnover ratio and state-owned shares and negatively related to its offering price, issuing size, etc. Meanwhile, this study extends the estimation and compares these IPOs’ short-run underperformance on their 10th, 20th, 30th trading day. We find that the levels of short-run underpricing shrink. Both allocation mechanisms and underwriters can impact the degree of shrinking. The second empirical study estimates the duration from offering to listing of Chinese A-share IPOs issued from 1994 to 2005. We firstly explain the different IPO issuing procedures under the Administrative Authorizing System and the Approval System respectively and then compare the effects of these two issuing systems on the length of this duration. The findings indicate that the waiting time to listing has been shortened greatly after the Approval System is adopted. Secondly, this study emphasizes on exploring endogenous factors related to an issuer itself, such as this issuer’s quality, market sentiment, allocation mechanism, and underwriter, etc. Then a Cox proportional hazard model is employed to examine these factors’ influences on this issuer’s final listing. Further, this study extends the analysis to explore the role of the issuing system and issuing year respectively. Most endogenous factors are found to still be functioning when we take into account the effect of the issuing system, but the effects of underwriter, allocation mechanism, offering price and floatation size diminish in favour of the effect of issuing year. The third empirical study focuses on detecting hot and cold IPO cycles in the Chinese A-share market during 1994-2005 using a Markov regime switching model. We introduce a set of observations to measure IPO monthly activities, which include the number of IPOs, underpricing, market conditions and duration to listing, and thus establish a model to estimate these activities' average performance in hot and cold periods respectively. It is found that a hot period is related with an abundant supply of IPOs, high levels of underpricing, positive market conditions and short waiting time to listing. This study presents the turning points of hot and cold periods for each observation. The cycles detected by the number of IPOs are the benchmark and then these cycles’ robustness is tested by the other observations.