Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Do Private Firms Benefit From Trading In The Private Securities Market?, Robert Loveland, Eric Fricke, Sinan Goktan

The Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance

The trading of private securities has recently gained greater visibility and importance with the advent of organized, private security exchanges. This paper uses data on IPO firms that list on the SharesPost private securities exchange platform to examine the potential benefits of a listing. Specifically, we test whether a listing reduces IPO underpricing or enables liquidity provision to firm employees. Controlling for endogeneity, we find no evidence that a pre-IPO listing on SharesPost lessens IPO underpricing. However, we also find that SharesPost-listed companies are able to pay their employees less in cash and more in stock and stock options than …