Corporate Ownership Structure and Cost of Raising Capital for Seasoned Equity Offerings

This paper examines the differences in announcement effects among Combined, Primary, and Secondary SEOs. Earlier studies suggest that primary SEOs might signal stock over-pricing, while secondary SEOs might increase misalignment of interests between insiders and shareholders. Theoretically, combined SEO might experience the negative incentive effects from both the primary and secondary SEOs. However, the empirical result is curious. We find that Primary SEO suffers the most negative 3-day cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) upon announcement, followed by Combined SEOs, while Secondary SEOs experience the smallest, but statistically significant negative 3-day CAR. To seek some explanation for this curious empirical result, we investigate the patterns of ownership among the three types of SEOs. Insider ownership is highest for combined SEO, while institutional ownership is highest for the secondary issues, with block ownership also highest for the combined SEOs. We argue that such differences in ownership structure at least provide some explanation to the reason why combined SEOs are not perceived to exhibit the negative incentive effects associated with both primary and secondary SEOs.