The regulator plays an active role in the IPO process via its pre-IPO communications with firms, writing 3.8 comment letters per company. To evaluate the regulator's input, we analyze these communications between the SEC and firms using LDA-analysis and KL-divergence. Main topics of SEC concerns...

We study the extent of fraud in initial coin offerings (ICOs), and whether information disclosure prior to the issuance predicts fraud. We document different types of fraud, and that fraudulent ICOs are on average much larger than the sample average. Issuers that disclose their code on GitHub...