Reverse LBO Underpricing: Information Asymmetry Or Price Support?

Abstract

Most studies attribute the underpricing of initial public offerings of equity securities to the ex ante uncertainty resulting from the information differential between the firm going public and the market. Rund (1991, 1993), however, proposes that underpricing could result from underwriter price support in the early after-market. In this paper we examine firms that were once public, went private via leveraged buyout and then went public again. It is reasonable to expect that since these reverse LBOs (RLBOs) were once publicly traded, they should have less of an information differential with the market than firms going public for the first time. Our tests indicate that there is little or no information asymmetry between RLBOs and the market. We find that RLBO initial returns are more consistent with price support than with information asymmetry.