The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:32:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Considering Causes and Remedies for Declining IPO Volume – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Considering Causes and Remedies for Declining IPO Volume https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/04/02/considering-causes-and-remedies-for-declining-ipo-volume/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=considering-causes-and-remedies-for-declining-ipo-volume https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/04/02/considering-causes-and-remedies-for-declining-ipo-volume/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:36:15 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=26979?d=20180516163054EDT Posted by , on Monday, April 2, 2012
Editor's Note:

The following post comes to us from Jay R. Ritter, Cordell Professor of Finance at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration. This post is based on Professor Ritter’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, available here.

I will first give some general remarks on the reasons for the low level of U.S. IPO volume this decade and the implications for job creation and economic growth, and then make some suggestions on the specific bills that the Senate is considering.

First, there is no doubt that fewer American companies have been going public since the tech stock bubble burst in 2000, and the drop is particularly pronounced for small companies. During 1980-2000, an average of 165 companies with less than $50 million in inflation-adjusted annual sales went public each year, but in 2001-2011, the average has fallen by more than 80%, to only 29 small firm IPOs per year. The patterns are illustrated in Figure 1.

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