why do firms go dark（为什么公司去黑）.pdfVIP

Why Do Firms Go Dark? András Marosi and Nadia Massoud† University of Alberta Current version: November 2005 First version: March 25, 2004 † The authors are from the Department of Finance and Management Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2R6. E-mail: amarosi@ualberta.ca and nmassoud@ualberta.ca. Phone: 780-492- 4279. Fax: 780-492-3325. We would like to thank Lawrence Booth, Eugene Kandel, Vikas Mehrotra, Randall Morck, Andrey Pavlov, Barry Scholnick and Sheridan Titman, an anonymous referee as well as seminar participants at Hebrew University, Simon Frasier University, the University of Alberta, the University of Texas at Austin, the Northern Finance Association meetings, the First CGA Manitoba Finance and the Boundaries of SEC Regulation conferences for their comments and suggestions and Pink Sheets LLC for making data on OTC trading available. We would like to acknowledge financial support from the National Research Program on Financial Services Public Policy at York University and Massoud would like to acknowledge financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and University of Alberta Fellowships. Guo Hou, Wael Montasser, Federica Pazzaglia, Rahul Ravi, Gloria Tian, Saif Ullah and Sherry Wang provided excellent research assistance. Why Do Firms Go Dark? Abstract In recent years a number of firms and banks have decided to “go dark,” i.e. deregister with the SEC and delist from the major exchanges despite having a large number of outside shareholders. This paper seeks to answer two important questions: why do firms choose to go dark? and what are the consequences for shareholders? We find that firms with fewer valuable growth opportunities, greater insider ownership, lower institutional ownership, higher leve