This paper offers a review and discussion of the evidence concerning the underpricing and long run performance of British PIPOs (Privatisation Initial Public Offerings) between 1977-1996, i.e. from the first privatisation under a Labour Government (British Petroleum), until the last ones by a Conservative Government (Railtrack). We exclude more recent years because the change of government, the introduction of a windfall tax on excess profits of regulated utilities, and changes in the regulatory regime, mark a totally different landscape as compared with the previous twenty years. We find evidence that underpricing was not followed by underperformance, as is usually observed with IPOs, but rather strong outperformance. We decompose this trend by subgroups within a 55 observations sample, and conclude that lax regulation was probably the main driving force between abnormal returns of British PIPOs.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics University of Milan Italy in its series Departemental Working Papers with number
2002-23.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods L32 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Public Enterprises
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)