Jay Ritter draws a graph on a whiteboard in a classroom

Jay Ritter works with SEC to examine middle-market IPOs

In a recent speech, Robert J. Jackson, Jr. reminisced on his time as a young banker and traveling to Silicon Valley to pitch his firm to companies interested in pursuing an IPO. Back then, he recalled, his company charged a seven percent fee for a middle-market IPO. When Jackson became Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in early 2018, he wanted to know if, as he assumed, “technology and competition…eventually lead bankers to give middle-market companies better pricing on IPOs.”

In order to answer this question, Jackson turned to Mr. IPO himself, Cordell Eminent Scholar Jay Ritter to find out if there had been a change in middle-market IPO pricing. Jackson details how Dr. Ritter helped the SEC understand new data in middle-market IPOs in this speech featured on the SEC website.