Ranking underwriters of European IPOs

Reputational capital is a valuable asset for underwriters in IPO markets. Existing measures of their reputation are tailored to the US market, where the same established investment banks typically handle IPOs on both the NYSE and NASDAQ. The widely used Carter-Manaster rankings do not grade the reputations of underwriters of 67.5% of IPOs in Europe. The European IPO market is a series of domestic markets, where most underwriters operate almost entirely in a single country. This paper presents European-based rankings of 260 underwriters of 3,776 IPOs in France, Italy, Germany, and the UK from 1995 to 2010, with the number of IPOs underwritten and the amount of capital raised.