Upper Echelon and Third Party Endorsement and Harvest Performance

Youngkeun Choi

Abstract

Using a sample of 304 IPOs in the Korea, this paper examines interlinks between the characteristics of executives, the endorsement by the governments or parent companies and IPO performance measured in terms of the market capitalization of IPO firms. The results demonstrated that educational level, functional background and school prestige of executives are positively associated with the market capitalization at IPO. But age of executives, venture certification by Korean government and corporate venturing which this paper regards as the endorsement by third party have no significant relationship.