Abstract
The paper examines the relationship between pre-IPO characteristics (e.g., profitability, firm size and the share of stocks held by board of directors) of IPO firms and intellectual capital disclosure. Based on Guthrie & Petty (2000) framework, three dimensions with 18 intellectual capital disclosure keywords were proposed. A content analysis supported by a data mining tool was deployed to analyze the frequency, quality and compound indexes in 142 IPO prospectuses in the period of 1992-2006. The results revealed the: (1) the corporate profitability is significantly positively correlated to the disclosure frequencies of external capital and human capital, but is significantly negatively correlated to the disclosure quality of human capital; (2) the corporate size in term of sales is significantly negatively correlated to disclosure quality of external capital; (3) however, the corporate size in term of number of employees has significantly positively correlated to disclosure frequency and quality of overall intellectual capital; (4) the company stock share held by board of directors is negatively correlated to the overall intellectual capital, but not statistical significance. The stock market administration can provide more supports to guide the small and medium enterprise and internal capital disclosure in the IPO prospectuses