The registration statement, the inquiry letter, and the reply letter are the main application materials for companies wanting to list on the Science and Technology Innovation Board (STAR) need to submit to regulatory agencies In this paper, we aim to study the impact of these three kinds of application materials on the successful listing of companies on STAR market in China through six text characteristics, including Words, Boilerplate, Fog Index, HardInfoMix, Redundancy, and Specificity for the first time. In the empirical analysis, we collect the registration statements and the inquiry-reply letters of 220 listed companies and 64 unlisted companies from June 13, 2019 to January 31, 2021 to perform the regression analysis. The empirical results show that, for registration statements, higher Words and Boilerplate will improve the success rate for listing, but higher Redundancy will lead to the failed listing. For the inquiry-reply letter, only the number of questions contained in the inquiry letter is negatively significantly associated with the initial public offering (IPO) success rate, while the text characteristics of the reply letter have little to do with the IPO success rate.
Read full abstract