Abstract
Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) have become increasingly important in the contemporary economics and finance. They represent the entrance on a deep and liquid market with access to unlimited reserves of capital from all over the world. But IPOs can also appear as a short-term fund-raising tool, which was used during the high tech bubble in the late 1990s in new, innovative and invincible-looking start-up companies from the Silicon Valley. In those years, investment bankers (who set up IPOs for the companies going public) thrived and were apprehensive about the "kings of capitalism?. Since then, the euphoria vanished but IPOs continued to exist. Between 1980 and 2001, the number of IPOs in the US exceeded one per business day . The distribution was not equal: in 1999 and 2000 alone, 900 companies went public.
