Resumen
This paper investigates changes in long-term operational and financial performance for a sample of Brazilian companies made initial public offerings (IPO's) shares, in the period 2002-2008. This period showed a historically high number of IPOs, a heavily discontinued phenomenon with the international financial crisis of 2008. As performance measures were chosen six financial indicators usually adopted in the literature in periods of three years pre-IPO, year of listing and three years post-IPO. The indicators evaluated were size, growth rate, profitability, financial leverage, investment level and investment rate. The results show evidence that, on average, there were statistically significant improvements in size, profitability, investment level and investment rate. But there was no evidence statistically significant changes in the growth rate and financial leverage after the IPO of Brazilian firms.