IPOs and Entrepreneurial Firms

The listing on a stock exchange is a paramount milestone in the life cycle of an enterprise. By taking their company public on a stock market through an Initial Public Offering (IPO), entrepreneurs may target several benefits (e.g., raising money, facilitating acquisitions, offering valuable stock ownership plans to employees) but their firms will bear new costs and requirements. In this work we review the academic literature on IPOs of entrepreneurial firms, focusing on five main topics: (i) the going public decision, (ii) pricing and valuation, (iii) the role of intermediaries and underwriters in the listing process, (iv) the performance of IPO-firms in the short and long run, and (v) market cycles in the IPO industry.