Arbitrage opportunities and event impacts on Spanish rights issues

In equity offerings in which pre-emptive subscription rights are issued, there are two ways of acquiring the company's shares: either by buying them directly on the market, or by subscribing to the new shares using the subscription rights. This could lead to the existence of arbitrage opportunities. In addition, the announcement of these processes incorporates very relevant information to the market, which could generate abnormal returns for the shares. This paper analyses both hypotheses simultaneously on the same sample and concludes that there are indeed arbitrage opportunities and also abnormal returns can be detected. Furthermore, it is also concluded that these effects are especially …