market timing, lifecycle stage and seasoned equity offerings

The tradeoff theory suggests that companies must issue shares to investments, when its leverage index is greater than your target rate, while the pecking order theory predicts that when capital offerings occur, the capital will be used to finance investments as the last source of funding, after their debt capacity have been exhausted. In contrast, the market timing theory predicts arguments that companies will adopt opportunistic behavior by issuing shares to take advantage of the high prices of the shares. Although the market timing theory has a significant influence on the decision to make a SEO, Brazilian literature contains little evidence about their economic importance and their effects. Thus, the present research aims to fill this gap in the Brazilian scenario. Specifically, we sought to assess the explanatory power of the relationship of market timing and the lifecycle theory in the issuance of SEO, which predicts that young companies with high market-to-book (MB) and low operating cash flow sell shares to finance the investment, while mature companies, with low MB, pay dividends and fund investment internally. The sample was composed by non-financial companies with shares traded on BM&FBovespa. As main results, we can conclude that there is relationship between SEO and MB and size. On the other hand, were not observed evidence confirming the relationship between lifecycle stage and stock return, both in the previous year, and the year following the completion of the offer.