Publications

Sustainable investing is a rapidly growing and evolving field. With investors expressing ever greater interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics and reporting, companies face a sustainability imperative and the need to remake their business models to respond to an array of pressing issues including climate change, air and water pollution, racial justice, workplace diversity, economic inequality, privacy, corporate integrity, and good governance. From equities to fixed income and from private equity to impact-investing, investors of all kinds now want to understand which companies will be marketplace leaders in a business future redefined by sustainability. Thus, investment strategies, risk models, financial vehicles, applications, data, metrics, standards, and regulations are all changing rapidly around the world.

IPO firms’ rivals tend to experience performance declines following an IPO in the industry. Why? We estimate a dynamic structural oligopoly model to distinguish among alternative theories that can explain an industry’s evolution post-IPO. We find that most changes in rivals’ performance are due to industry trends that also drive IPOs. However, there are also some “competitive” IPOs where the IPO enhances the IPO firm’s performance, at the expense of competitors. These findings help reconcile prior evidence of average performance reductions of both IPO firms and their rivals with well-known cases in which firms have benefited from going public.