We compare uniform price auctions with fixed price offerings in Initial Public Offerings (IPO) using laboratory experiments. The experimental environment is based on the Biais and Faugeron-Grouzet (J. Financ. Intermed. 11:9-36, 2002) model. Standard predictions based on tacit collusion equilibria (TCE) suggest lower revenues in uniform price auctions, although alternative equilibria allow for higher revenues. In our experiment, there is no evidence that TCE are played. The experiment suggests that the uniform price auctions are superior to fixed price offerings in terms of raising revenues.

Narratives and conventions have received considerable attention in recent discussions of the valuation of financial assets. Narratives and conventions, however, can only be effective to the extent that they attract and persuade audiences, and this article makes the case for paying more attention to those audiences. In particular, the article argues that financial assets can only be established as assets if there is a group of potential investors that has been persuaded to accept them as such: to take them seriously as potential investments. The article coins the term asset circles to refer to such groups and supports the argument with a discussion of venture capital and its role in the production of unicorns: private companies with extraordinary valuations. Venture capital firms may be thought of as value entrepreneurs, and much of the venture capital process is oriented towards constructing both value narratives for the companies they invest in and asset circles prepared to accept those value narratives. Their aim in these processes is a profitable exit, in which the venture capital firm converts its investment back into cash at a considerable profit through either an acquisition or a flotation.

This article analyses the financial regulation of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (‘SPACs’) in the European Union and SPAC reform in the UK against the main legal system where the SPAC originates: the US. I argue that the US and financial regulators in Europe have opposing views on SPACs, evidenced by the adoption of two different regulatory approaches. As opposed to a SPAC regulation by business or function and by enforcement in the US, the European Union and the UK are implementing a SPAC regulation by objectives, where general principles of company and financial law inform the SPAC legal discipline. This enormously enriches the SPAC current debate, and sheds new light on the subject.

As a firm prepares for initial public offering, the Securities and Exchange Commission mandates that top managers must record risks to their firms’ survival or performance in the prospectus. More specifically we propose that external risk factors (market risks, legal risks, and government regulations risks) have a more negative effect on investor optimism and initial public offering valuation, while internal risk factors (management risks, operational risks, technical risks) have a more negative effect on post-initial public offering long-term firm survival. This study illustrates a major gap between risk factors that investors initially focus on and the true determinants of long-term success.

Does climate affect behaviour and social process? In this case study, powerful scientific, anthropological and archaeological arguments are deployed to show that it can. The capricious climate of the latest centuries of the Marquesas Islands was instrumental in transforming a chieftain society into less hereditary and more flexible polities by the time of European contact.