Does market misvaluation help explain share market long-run underperformance following a seasoned equity issue?
Author InfoPhilip Brown Gerry Gallery Olivia Goei Abstract We examine the relation between pre-seasoned equity offering (SEO) announcement date misvaluation and long-run post-SEO performance for a large sample of Australian SEOs made between 1993 and 2001. Our study is motivated by inconsistent findings across countries with respect to the SEO long-run underperformance anomaly first documented in the USA, inconclusive findings with respect to the hypothesis that managers exploit market misvaluation when timing equity issues, and a recent Australian Stock Exchange proposal to loosen SEO regulation. We find SEO firms underperform common share market benchmarks for up to 5 years after the announcement. Using a residual income valuation method, we show that this underperformance is related to pre-announcement date misvaluation. An unexpected result is that underperformance and misvaluation are more severe for private placements than rights issues. Institutional factors unique to the Austra