Bank IPOs and Regulations: Cross‐Country Evidence

The present paper investigates the effect of banking industry regulations on bank initial public offering (IPO) underpricing. We approach this question from both a micro‐level and macro‐level regulatory perspective. First, we conduct our analysis within a micro framework, focusing on the effect of disclosure rules on IPO underpricing. Second, we examine the effect of regulatory and supervisory indices on bank regulations related to the three Pillars of Basel II, as expanded by Basel III (i.e. capital requirements, supervisory power, and market discipline) as well as restrictions on bank activities constructed using the World Bank database. We employ a dataset of 948 bank common share IPOs across 41 countries, covering the period from January 1994 to December 2020. Our findings indicate that stronger banking regulations, both at the disclosure and supervisory levels, are associated with significantly lower IPO underpricing. By improving transparency and monitoring, regulatory frameworks that enhance market discipline and expand supervisory authority improve the integrity of the IPO process, leading to offer prices that more accurately reflect the underlying value of the issuing banks. IPOs listed under a strict regulatory framework experience lower levels of underpricing. We attribute our results to intense monitoring, where regulations that promote market discipline result in better outcomes for the banking sector. Consequently, economic rents are curtailed, and the benefits to investors increase. These results suggest that reducing information asymmetries through regulation contributes to more efficient capital allocation. To test the robustness of our findings, we conduct an additional analysis only for the U.S. banks’ IPO initial returns, subject to additional institutional reforms in the U.S. financial industry. These results corroborate our baseline conclusions, further reinforcing the observed negative relationship between IPO underpricing and the strength of the regulatory and supervisory framework.