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...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the IPO literature since 2000. The fewer numbers of companies going public in recent years has raised many questions regarding the IPO process, in both academic and regulatory circles. As we all strive to understand these changes in the...

The agenda of the U.S. government extends across a myriad of agencies, topics, and regulatory stages. Using novel data from the Federal Register, we quantify the entire government agenda. We find that many regulatory topics are handled by multiple government agencies. For each firm, we measure...