The Global Financial Crisis’ Impact on Short-term Performance of IPO: The Case Study of New Zealand Firms’ IPOs

The global financial crisis had major effects on the New Zealand (NZ) capital market, financial system and economy. It prompted responses across the full range of the NZ Securities Commission and the NZ Reserve Bank policies, including amendment of the Securities Act 2009, monetary policy, liquidity management and prudential policies. This paper investigates the impact of global financial crisis on short-term performance of New Zealand firms’ Initial Public Offering (IPOs) for the period before, during and after the crisis. Using New Zealand firms’ IPOs from 2006 to 2010, this study employs an event study method which applies market adjusted return and market model to calculate abnormal returns. Two-sample mean-comparison test and the Multivariate Regression Model (MVRM) are used in this study. The result reveals that there is a significant difference between short-term IPOs’ performance before, during and after the global financial crisis. Further, the MVRM result supports the two-sample mean-comparison test result in which 2008 and 2009 periods have a negative significant impact on abnormal returns, suggesting that it has underperformed the average market returns. This study provides recent evidence for New Zealand IPOs’ short-run performance during the global financial crisis. A study of New Zealand is interesting as most previous studies consider mature markets like the US and the UK.