COBA Student Publication

Abdullah Al Aujan, a recent graduate from the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) with a finance major at the College of Business Administration (COBA), has published a peer-refereed article entitled “IPOs Underpricing in the Saudi Stock Exchange Market” in The Empirical Economics Letters. The article is co-authored by Dr. Yaseen Ghulam, a former finance faculty at Al Yamamah University and currently, he is a senior lecturer in finance at University of Portsmouth, UK.

The study examines the determinants of the offer prices of IPOs on the Saudi Arabian Stock Market and found that investors of the IPOs firms had more than 50% short-run returns, while this figure is 25% for the long-run aftermarket. This study explained that the initial returns of the Saudi IPOs are mainly driven by the market volatility and the market performance prior to the issue which reflects the market demand and liquidity. In addition, the oversubscription rate of an issue tends to increase the level of long-run underpricing but not short-run.

Currently, Abdullah is an investment banking analyst. Before moving to investment banking, he served as a corporate finance analyst at KPMG. During his undergraduate studies at YU, Abdullah was a leading member of COBA team that participated and won the 2019 Bloomberg Trading Challenge.”