This paper develops a delegation-based framework to explain how institutional design shapes pricing incentives under risk. Using China’s 2016 IPO reform—which abolished prefunding requirements and transferred payment obligations from investors to underwriters—as a natural experiment, we show that introducing subscription-payment risk (SPR) renders underwriter’s partial residual claimants with respect to unpaid allocations. Building on Baron’s (1982) delegation model, we argue that the reform amplifies information asymmetry and induces underwriters to adopt more conservative pricing strategies to manage perceived payment risk. Empirically, IPOs exposed to SPR exhibit greater underpricing and lower offer prices, particularly when investor bids reflect stronger valuation pessimism. The effect tends to be less pronounced for reputable underwriters and when foreign institutional investors participate. Overall, the evidence demonstrates how risk redistribution and institutional frictions jointly shape underwriter behavior and pricing efficiency in primary equity markets.

How do market-design reforms affect secondary-market liquidity in an emerging equity market? We examine China’s ChiNext reform, which combined registration-based IPO issuance with changes in secondary-market trading rules. Using firm-month observations and high-frequency order-book data, we compare incumbent ChiNext firms with Main Board firms in a difference-in-differences framework. The results show that the reform significantly improves secondary-market liquidity, with consistent evidence across alternative DID estimators and liquidity measures. Dynamic estimates show comparable pre-reform movements and increasingly favorable liquidity outcomes after implementation. Cross-sectional analysis indicates stronger liquidity improvements among larger and more profitable firms. Microstructure results show narrower quoted spreads, broadly stable displayed depth, and a shift in order flow toward buyer-initiated trading. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the integrated ChiNext reform package improved secondary-market liquidity and reshaped the cross-sectional distribution of liquidity gains, highlighting the market-quality consequences of institutional reform in emerging equity markets.

The paper estimates the primary market pricing efficiency of China’s IPO after the IPO reform in June 2009, based on the stochastic frontier analysis. The results show that IPO pricing is not fully effective, and discover the existence of “deliberate underpricing”. The average pricing efficiency of China's IPO has reached 0.85, which is close to the level of the mature capital market; To certain extent, we can say that the reform of China's IPO has achieved the initial success. We also found that earnings per share and price earnings ratio are the greatest influencing factors. And there is no underwriter reputation in China. For different markets, we disclosed that, IPO pricing efficiency values in Growth Enterprise Market and Small and Medium Enterprise Board are substantially higher than the Main Board market. The paper analyzes the causes, and then gives some suggestions for the reform of China's IPO.