Recently, a number of high-profile issuers made their foray into the U.S. public markets offering a limited amount of shares, measured as a percentage of sharesoutstanding at offer. With that choice came implications for valuation, after-market performance, and trading behavior.

We begin by exploring the trend in offer sizes over the last three years. Looking at 338 initial public offerings of operating companies on U.S. exchanges since January 2009, we observe a notable decrease in the valuation-weighted offering size as a percentage of shares outstanding at offer. Note that herein company valuation is measured by multiplying the offer price by shares outstanding at offer. Excluding Banco Santander and General Motors, both with market capitalizations more than three times that of other IPOs in our universe ($51B and $50B respectively), deals have been shifting towards selling a smaller portion of shares outstanding. While IPOs in the last three years have offered on average 37% of their shares outstanding, deals in 2011 sold an average of 22% of their shares.