This study exemines the roles of corporate social activity (CSR) and executive compensation structure on the pricing of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) with special focus on the role of CSR in reducing the level of information asymmetry between managers and future shareholders of issuing firms through SEOs. This study also investigates the interaction between executive compensation structure and CSR on the discounting of SEOs. We use a sample of 2,102 seasoned equity offerings of U.S. firms with CSR scores from 1995 to 2015 in our OLS fixed effect regression analysis. The results show that issuing firms with high CSR are more likely to expericence a lower degree of the SEO discount. The results also document a positive association between CSR and a high proportion of equity-based compensation of issuing firms’ executives. The findings of this paper confirm that CSR attenuates the impact of information asymmetry and the pre-SEO price uncertainty on the pricing of the offers and hence the SEO discount. Furthermore, CSR reinforces the impact of executive firmrelated wealth on the discounting of seasoned equity offerings. It appears that firm-related wealth motivates managers to actively engage in reducing information asymmetry activities before SEOs, thereby decreasing the SEO discount.

This paper investigates the determinants on decision to conduct seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) of listed companies on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange in Vietnam. Seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) are defined as the issue of more stocks by a firm to raise more capital after a primary issue. Using panel data collected from audited financial statements of 99 listed companies on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange during 2014-2018, the study employs a logit regression model by fixed effects method to examine factors that affect the decision to implement seasoned equity offerings of those companies. The findings of this study show that profit, revenue growth and company’s size have a positively significant impact on the decision, while dividend pay-out ratio negatively significantly influences the equity issuing decision. Furthermore, these results are robust after controlling for the forms of equity offerings, i.e. bonus stocks, stock dividends and rights to buy shares. These findings are consistent with economic theories such as agency theory, pecking order theory, and growth opportunity theory, and also could be explained by the real situations of the Vietnamese stock exchange. This study has important implications for corporate managers, policy makers and investors.