event
Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar
Tuesday
16
April
Laurent Fresard

Technological Disruptiveness and the Evolution of IPOs and Sell-Outs

Laurent Fresard (Swiss Finance Institute)
, -

S4, Petal 2

The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is the Economics department's weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics.

Add to Calendar

As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to the public talk

Technological Disruptiveness and the Evolution of IPOs and Sell-Outs,
given by Laurent Fresard, Professor of Finance at the Swiss Finance Institute (coauthored with Donald E. Bowen III and Gerard Hoberg)

Laurent Fresard is Professor of Finance at the Università della Svizzera italiana and has held an SFI Senior Chair since 2017. Before joining the faculty in Lugano, Professor Frésard was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland and prior to that at HEC Paris. Professor Frésard’s papers have been published in leading academic journals and he has received a number of grants and awards.

Abstract: We show that the recent decline in IPOs on U.S. markets is related to changes in the technological disruptiveness of startups, which we measure using textual analysis of patents from 1930 to 2010. We focus on VC-backed startups and show that those with ex-ante disruptive technologies are more likely to exit via IPO and less likely to exit via sell-out. This is consistent with IPOs being favored by firms with the potential to carve out independent market positions with strong defenses against rivals. We document an economy-wide trend of declining technological disruptiveness since World War II that accelerated since the late 1990s. This trend predicts fewer IPOs and more sell-outs, and we find that roughly 20% of the recent dearth of IPOs, and 49% of the surge in sell-outs, can be attributed to changes in firms' technological characteristics.

VPRS-logo.png
The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is our Departmental weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics. The organizer for this academic year is Prof. Julia Cajal-Grossi(julia.cajal@graduateinstitute.ch)