Multinational Corporations and SEO Discounts

The fact that publicly traded companies incur substantial costs when issuing new equity has been extensively documented in the empirical finance literature. In particular, numerous studies show that seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) tend to be priced significantly below prevailing market prices, thereby causing issuers to leave money on the table. Offer price discounting is an indirect flotation cost borne by pre-SEO shareholders that, according to extant theoretical and empirical research, arises due to asymmetric information. A heretofore unrelated literature argues that corporate multinationalism, i.e., establishing operations in one or more foreign countries, exacerbates the asymmetric information problem via greater costs to shareholders of monitoring the activities and performance of foreign subsidiaries. Motivated by these lines of thought, I investigate the relation between SEO discounting and corporate multinationalism. Using a sample of SEOs completed by U.S. firms between 1998 and 2016, I show that offer price discounting is significantly higher in offerings conducted by multinational firms relative to those conducted by purely domestic firms after controlling for known determinants of SEO discounts. This effect is stronger for multinational firms with foreign subsidiaries spread across a greater number of countries and weaker for multinationals that hire a high-reputation underwriter to lead the underwriting syndicate. These findings suggest that asymmetric information costs borne by seasoned equity issuers are increasing in the geographic scope of a firm’s operations, which can be mitigated by certification from a highly reputed lead underwriter.