We investigate the relationship between the going-public decision and firm risk. We employ a comprehensive sample of firms that went public on European stock exchanges from 2000 to 2015 and examine how the risks of these newly listed firms are different from those of private firms and long-listing firms. We find that compared with private firms, newly listed firms have significantly increased risks of financial distress. This difference is largely attributable to the increase in leverage and the decline in liquidity, profitability and retained earnings. The results are consistent after controlling for selection bias, the effect of stock issuance, and the impact of the financial crisis and are robust to different risk indicators and estimation models (namely, the treatment effect model and DID). Finally, we find that the risks of newly listed firms are much higher than those of long-listing firms, and the risk effect of newly listed firms gradually weakens after listing. We argue that the increase in risk of IPO firms is temporary and is likely to be caused by the transition to public listing.

我们研究了上市决策与公司风险之间的关系。我们采用了从2000年到2015年在欧洲证券交易所上市的公司的综合样本，并研究了这些新上市公司的风险与私营公司和长期上市公司的风险有何不同。我们发现，与私营公司相比，新上市公司的财务困境风险显着增加。这种差异主要归因于杠杆的增加以及流动性，盈利能力和未分配利润的下降。在控制选择偏向，股票发行的影响以及金融危机的影响之后，结果是一致的，并且对于不同的风险指标和估计模型（即治疗效果模型和DID）具有鲁棒性。最后，我们发现，新上市公司的风险远高于长期上市公司，而新上市公司的风险效应在上市后逐渐减弱。我们认为，IPO公司风险的增加是暂时的，很可能是向公开上市过渡所致。