How sensitive are IPOs to the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic in emerging markets?

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between COVID-19-related pandemic fear and the short-term performance of initial public offerings in emerging markets. This paper investigates whether the short-term fear of COVID-19 continues to influence post-IPO performance. In doing so, the fundamental methodology is cross-sectional ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and numerous variables are included to the model as control variables.

The results show that whether looking at the first-day trading price of an IPO or the subsequent trading prices, the effect of pandemic fear (GFI, RCI and RDI) was positive. However, results were somewhat different for HighGFI, which was a dummy variable indicating severity of fear as they were negative in all cases. These results conclude that investors are not making IPO decisions in the first few days, but that over time the effect of high pandemic fear accumulates and suppresses subsequent trading prices.