Sky Blog
In April 2026, SpaceX announced an agreement giving it the right to acquire the AI coding company Cursor for $60 billion in SpaceX stock after SpaceX went public. If that stock transaction did not occur, the agreement called for a …
Many companies approaching an initial public offering face a familiar concern: whether the underwriters responsible for marketing the deal are fully aligned with the issuer’s interests. IPO underpricing – the tendency for shares to jump in price on the first …
The rise of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) as an alternative pathway to public markets represents one of the most significant features of entrepreneurial ventures in the last few years. Between 2020 and 2021, SPACs accounted for over 40% of …
Going public represents a milestone in corporate evolution, opening doors to capital markets and enabling expansion. Yet what if this achievement comes with hidden costs for the people who work at these companies? Our recent analysis of millions of Glassdoor …
The under-pricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) has puzzled researchers for decades. First-day returns average around 15 percent, translating into billions of dollars left on the table by issuers and picked up by investors allocated shares in the IPO. The …
Investors generally expect companies to make a successful and profitable debut on the stock market with their initial public offering (IPO). However, some stock market launches fall short: The price of shares in Deliveroo’s $2.8 billion IPO in 2021, for …
Millions of dollars are spent every year by international financial institutions and development agencies to promote legal reforms in countries around the world. Indeed, since the late 1990s, legal reforms have become a key tool for trying to promote …
Public securities markets have undergone dramatic changes in recent years. Not only has the number of publicly traded firms been declining, but the nature of the firms that choose to go public has also changed. While publicly traded firms in …
In our recent paper, Can Governance Help in Making an IPO “Successful”? New Evidence from Europe, we find that corporate governance affects company performance after an IPO in different ways. We consider an IPO to be successful if it …
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone from politicians to reporters to ordinary Americans have been talking about drug treatments, vaccines, and the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approval process. These discussions have centered on vaccine developments by well-known pharmaceutical …
When Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman announced plans to sell stakes in state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Saudi Aramco) in 2016, he was also setting the stage for the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in history. On December …
Dual class capital structures have spread exponentially in recent years across much of the corporate world, as has previously been reported on this blog. Dual class listed companies today account for around $4 trillion of US total stock market value …
Most everyone has had their say about the collapse of WeWork’s failed initial public offering (“IPO”).[1] Clearly, this failure was overdetermined, as many competing causes can explain it, including: (1) the extraordinary level of self-dealing that its CEO, Adam …
The rise and fall of The We Company IPO bubble is one of those events that, like the subprime mortgage bubble that preceded the financial crisis, calls for an examination of market structures that could have produced such a precipitous …
Benchmark Capital partner and legendary tech investor Bill Gurley recently declared on CNBC, “It took me two decades to figure this out, but I think Silicon Valley’s been on the bad end of a bad joke for about four decades …
The dramatic implosion of the IPO of The We Company, parent of office-sharing firm WeWork, (the “WeWork IPO) has attracted intense scrutiny across the business community. For scholars and practitioners who work at the intersection of law, business, and technology, …
How do disclosure requirements influence a private firm’s decision to go public? This is an important question for regulators and corporate finance professionals, given current debate about how much information private firms should have to disclose. Conceptually, public disclosure requirements …
While the list of prospective issuers with credit ratings is lengthy, literature is sparse on how ratings from multiple credit rating agencies (CRAs) affect the performance of a company’s initial public offering (IPO). Our research is motivated by the lack …
Executive compensation elicits strong opinions from shareholders, practitioners, and the public alike. Ideally, compensation packages should be designed to attract, retain, and motivate executives to perform in accordance with the objectives of their companies’ shareholders. This idea is consistent with …
In the past 30 years, defaults on corporate bonds have been substantially higher than the historical average. Dividing the years from 1970 to 2016 into two equal periods, the default rate of U.S. corporate bonds rose from 0.12 percent to …