• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.1-34
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• 2010

Recently, failure rates of Kosdaq IPO firms are increasing and their survival rates tend to be very low, and when these firms do fail, often times backed by a number of governmental financial supports, they may inflict severe financial damage to investors, let alone economy as a whole. To ensure investors' confidence in Kosdaq and foster promising and healthy businesses, it is necessary to precisely assess their intrinsic values and survivability. This study investigates what contributed to the failure of IPO firms and analyzed how these elements are factored into corresponding firms' stock returns. Failure risks are assessed at the time of IPO. This paper considers factors reflecting IPO characteristics, a firm's underwriter prestige, auditor's quality, IPO offer price, firm's age, and IPO proceeds. The study further went on to examine how, if at all, these failure risks involved during IPO led to post-IPO stock prices. Sample firms used in this study include 98 Kosdaq firms that have failed and 569 healthy firms that are classified into the same business categories, and Logit models are used in estimate the probability of failure. Empirical results indicate that auditor's quality, IPO offer price, firm's age, and IPO proceeds shown significant relevance to failure risks at the time of IPO. Of other variables, firm's size and ROA, previously deemed significantly related to failure risks, in fact do not show significant relevance to those risks, whereas financial leverage does. This illustrates the efficacy of a model that appropriately reflects the attributes of IPO firms. Also, even though R&D expenditures were believed to be value relevant by previous studies, this study reveals that R&D is not a significant factor related to failure risks. In examing the relation between failure risks and stock prices, this study finds that failure risks are negatively related to 1 or 2 year size-adjusted abnormal returns after IPO. The results of this study may provide useful knowledge for government regulatory officials in contemplating pertinent policy and for credit analysts in their proper evaluation of a firm's credit standing.