Freshen up before going public: Do environmental, social, and governance factors affect firms' appearance during the initial public offering?
研究了意大利中小企业上市前环境、社会和治理（ESG）表现与IPO抑价的关系，发现上市前一年的ESG因素显著影响抑价，表明可持续性在IPO过程中起信号和形象改善作用。
Abstract Going public (or initial public offering IPO) is a corporate strategic decision for value enhancement. Underpricing is a phenomenon related to going public and has been studied from a purely financial perspective. In this paper, we investigate whether underpricing incorporates sustainability performance pre‐IPO by establishing an original linkage between underpricing and ESG factors before the firm's listing on stock markets. Using informational asymmetries and quality signaling frameworks, we track the journey of going public by Italian Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) from 2009 to 2017 and show how sustainability issues are incorporated into the IPO underpricing. We demonstrate that underpricing is strongly related to financial and sustainability variables only in the year just before the IPO, indicating better informational efficiency, quality signaling, and image‐improving practice. The post‐IPO stock return is less correlated with the firm's financial and ESG variables, suggesting that markets can incorporate such information into stock returns in the long run. This paper provides novel insights by delivering an original linkage between a firm's public listing attributes and sustainability performance, offering a temporal tracking of the SMEs before and after the IPO, emphasizing the role of sustainability in the IPO process.