Public Issue Rules Revisited: An EWCI-Based Analysis of IPO Allocation Reforms in Bangladesh
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study examines whether stakeholders perceive the 2021 amendments to the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (Public Issue) Rules, 2015 as economically rational and how the financial performance of book-built issuers differed before and after the reform. The study employs a multi-source quantitative design. The perception component uses a structured questionnaire administered to 450 capital-market stakeholders and constructs eleven Equal-Weighted Composite Indices to measure perceived regulatory rationality and its hypothesized determinants. The firm-level component descriptively compares sixteen financial ratios and two market-performance ratios for nine book-built issuers, comprising seven firms listed before and two firms listed after the amendment. Associations among the perception indices are estimated using Ordinary Least Squares and a generalized linear model with heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors. Under the retained 0–4 coding, in which higher scores indicate stronger disagreement, respondents on average did not regard the amendment as rational. The economic-impact and fund-mobilization indices exhibited the largest associations with the rationality index. Post-amendment issuers recorded weaker average profitability and valuation outcomes, although liquidity and leverage results were mixed. Given the small and unequal firm samples, these comparisons are exploratory and do not establish causal effects. The study contributes early evidence on perception-based evaluation of IPO allocation reform in an emerging capital market.
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7204260117