An empirical investigation of market timing behavior: evidence from Indian IPOs

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the market timing behavior of issuers of Indian Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). It was found that investor’s expectation that earnings growth will continue after IPO were not even sustained in post IPO period. The constant decline in P/E and M/B suggested that firms took advantage of over-optimism of investors. The deterioration in post IPO performance show that issuer took benefit of pre IPO profit margin knowing that the level would not be continued in the future. Considering that the issuers took advantage of favorable market condition, a multivariate analysis was carried out to examine whether issuers tried to maximize their proceeds through IPO or not. The idea is that any market timing aspect should get reflected in the effort to maximize proceeds in the favorable market condition. The result based on multivariate regression suggest that market timers, identified as firms that go public when the market is hot, tried to maximize the total proceeds at the time of IPO. The hot issue market effect was remarkably robust; it was significant for both firm and industry-level characteristics