Impact of anchor investors on IPO returns during pre-market and aftermarket: evidence from India

Purpose - The unique regulatory design of India provides us with the opportunity to disaggregate traditional initial public offering (IPO) underpricing into three categories: voluntary, pre-market and post-market. The presence of anchor investors in India makes it a compelling case to study. These individuals were introduced to bring transparency in the book building process, but their impact on pre-market and post-market underpricing was not foreseen. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of anchor investors on the IPO underpricing after disaggregation and on the long-run performance of an IPO. Design/methodology/approach - A sample covering 232 IPOs from a period of 2009–2018 is included. The empirical analysis explores the impact of various firm-specific as well as market-specific variables on IPO underpricing. The financial data for the empirical analysis are extracted from Prime database and websites of National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange. To deal with the outliers effectively, this paper deploys “robust-regression.” Findings - The study finds that investor’s subscription rate and voluntary underpricing impacts the pre-market but do not have any impact on the post-market while the age of the firm has a different impact on both the markets and the number of anchor investors have the same impact in both markets. Anchor investors’ participation increases the pre-market as well as post-market underpricing. Lastly, the long-term performance of IPOs backed by the anchor investors is high relative to the IPOs not subscribed to by the anchor investors. Originality/value - This paper is believed to be the first attempt to study the impact of anchor investors on the disaggregated IPO underpricing. The findings of this study will have a great insight for the investors.