Soft Strategic Information and IPO Underpricing

ABSTRACTUsing content analysis, we measure the impact of soft information, derived from words in initial public offering (IPO) registration documents, on IPO pricing efficiency. First, using 2,298 U.S. IPOs from 1996–2008, we find that an IPO document's strategic tone correlates positively with the stock's first-day return; more frequent usage of positive and/or less frequent usage of negative strategic words leads to more IPO underpricing. Second, we find that an IPO document's strategic tone is negatively correlated with the stock's long-run return. Together, these findings imply that investors initially misprice soft information in registration statements, which mispricing is eventually corrected. Additionally, we create new content-analysis libraries for strategic words and introduce a survey-based library creation method and word-weighting system.