Speaker on timing of IPOs

The Van Berkom Endowed Chair in Small-Cap Equities invited Dr. Simon Benninga to speak on Oct. 15.

Dr. Benninga is dean of the Faculty of Management at Tel Aviv University, and the Max and Steffi Perlman Professor of Financial Economics at Tel Aviv University. The founding editor of the European Financial Review, he has written several books, all published by MIT Press.

His talk was titled “The Timing of Initial Public Offerings.”
In it, he examined the tradeoff between an entrepreneur’s private benefits, which are lost whenever the firm is publicly traded, and the gains from diversification.

He made reference to the high incidence of re-privatization of recent IPOs, the clustering of IPOs and buyouts in time, the industry concentration of IPO waves, and the under-performance over the long run of recently issued stock relative to the shares of longer-listed companies.

The Concordia Chair in Small-Cap Equities was established in 2003 thanks to an endowment provided by J. Sebastian van Berkom, a 1969 graduate of Concordia.

His firm, Van Berkom and Associates, focuses on Canadian and U.S. small-capitalization equities, a major engine of growth.
Finance professor Lorne Switzer is using the resources of the Chair to establish a Canadian benchmark for small-cap returns to assess performance.