Ritter, Gao & Zhu on Decreasing IPOs

Jay R. Ritter, Xiaohui Gao & Zhongyan Zhu have posted “Where Have All the IPOs Gone?” on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

During 1980-2000, an average of 311 companies per year went public in the U.S. Since the technology bubble burst in 2000, the average has been only 102 initial public offerings (IPOs) per year, with the drop especially precipitous among small firms. Many have blamed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the 2003 Global Settlement’s effects on analyst coverage for the decline in U.S. IPO activity. We offer an alternative explanation. We posit that the advantages of selling out to a larger organization, which can speed a product to market and realize economies of scope, have increased relative to the benefits of remaining as an independent firm. Consistent with this hypothesis, we document that there has been a decline in the profitability of small company IPOs, and that small company IPOs have provided public market investors with low returns throughout the last three decades. Venture capitalists have been increasingly exiting their investments with trade sales rather than IPOs, and an increasing fraction of firms that have gone public have been involved in acquisitions. Our analysis suggests that IPO volume will not return to the levels of the 1980s and 1990s even with regulatory changes.

SJP