성장 벤처기업의 임직원 스톡옵션과 IPO 저평가의 관련성에 대한 연구

Recently it is reported that IPO firms strategically underprice their IPOs for insiders to maximize their potential profit from endowment and exercise of executive stock options(ESOs). It meets with other insiders’ incentives to underprice IPOs. VCs want to utilize market conditions and to recover their funds in order to invest in another growth firms, which leads IPO process to be completed as soon as possible. This study explores if IPO underpricing phenomenon is related with the grant and exercise of ESOs around offering day and whether VCs are involved in the relation between IPO underpricing and ESOs. We analyzed a total of 318 IPO firms listed in KOSDAQ Market from year 2002 to year 2008. These data are classed by the pattern of grant and exercise of ESOs – IPOOPT which means firms granting ESOs around offering day(n=0), IPOEOPT which means firms have exercisable ESOs on the offering day(n=39), IPOEXE which means firms exercised their ESOs around IPO date(n=11). The results are like followings;Firstly, No firm endowed ESOs around IPO day to lower the exercise price. The number of firms holding ESOs was 103 but 39 firms possessed exercisable ESOs. In addition, just 11 firms actually exercised their ESOs around IPO. These results mean that IPO firms did not utilize compensation system well to increase their value, which was different from the case in oversea research. Secondly, there is no statistical significance in the relation between IPO underpricing and IPOEOPT or IPOEXE. However IPOEOPT affects IPO underpricing in a positive way when VCs are concerned in the IPO process. This result means that IPOs may be unperpriced more if the incentive to underprice IPOs coincide between insiders holding exercisable ESOs and VCs. This study has the significance in that this is the first paper to explore the relation between IPO underpricing and the ESOs in KOSDAQ market in Korea.