Positive, Negative, Uncertain: What Can Readability and Sentiment Tell us About Abnormal SPAC Returns?
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Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), an alternative to an IPO to take companies public, exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020- in fact, the number of SPACs that went public in the United States grew by over 320% from 2019 to 2020, and an additional 147% from 2020 to 2021. In these two years, known as the “SPAC Boom,” the US market was inundated with an unprecedented number of companies using SPACs as a vehicle to enter the public markets and matched by hungry investors ready to support these blank-check companies. Taking advantage of SPACs’ reduced regulation requirements, costs, and timeline compared to an initial public offering (IPO), at first it seemed like managers had discovered an innovative gold mine to take companies public. Even celebrities began buying into the hype and endorsing SPACs. In this paper, I examine the effect of the readability and sentiment of SPAC disclosures on a SPAC’s abnormal stock returns to investigate whether additional regulations should be enacted with respect to these variables to level the playing field with IPOs. In the first part, I examine whether readability and sentiment in SPAC disclosures has changed over time since the start of the SPAC boom, or as SPACs filed additional disclosure documents. In the second part, I identify whether these variables can help explain abnormal stock returns at the time of a filing.