Topic: Earnings Management, Underpricing and Underperformance of Chinese IPOs

Time:  May 9, 2008（Friday）3：00—4：30 PM    

Venue:  Room 501, Jiageng Bld 2

Chair： Xinrong Qiang, associate professor in accounting, IFAS

Abstract：

We examine the underpricing and long-term performance of Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs) issued during the 1998-2003 period in the accrual context. While issuers use income-increasing discretionary accruals to inflate earnings prior to IPOs, sentiment investors do not price discretionary accruals correctly but extrapolate past histories of managed earnings too far into the future. Consistent with the hypothesis that investors’ incorrect beliefs about unusual accruals lead to initial overpricing of the new issue and thereby seemingly underpricing from the issuer perspective, we find that discretionary accruals in the IPO year are positively related to underpricing but negatively related to long-term stock performance. These relations are statistically and economically significant and robust to alternative benchmarks, models, variable specifications, and robust standard errors.

Presenter Introduction：

Dr.Zhe Shen received his B.A. degree in Accountancy from Hangzhou Institute of Commerce, and M.Sc degree in Accounting and Financial Economics, and Ph.D. degree in Finance from University of Essex UK. He has recently joined the Institute of Financial and Accounting Studies at Xiamen University as Assistant Professor of Finance. His research interest includes IPOs, behavioral finance, and earnings management.

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