Abstract: The institutional arrangement for the administrative verification of the mergers and acquisitions is an important starting point for the optimization of the real economic structure, which can serve the national economic strategic layout, it is also related to the normal functioning of mergers and acquisitions and the healthy and market-oriented development of the capital market. Taking the industrial policy as the entry point and selecting the data of the cases of mergers and acquisitions of A-share listed companies verified by the Mergers and Acquisitions Committee from 2008 to 2018 as samples, this paper studies the essence of the administrative verification of the Mergers and Acquisitions Committee. The results show that when the listed companies supported by industrial policies are the acquirers, the M&A events are more likely to pass the administrative verification of the Mergers and Acquisitions Committee. The findings of further heterogeneous analysis show that the results of remarkably increased probability of M&A events verification of the listed companies supported by the industrial policies are mainly embodied in the samples of listed companies that are private enterprises or from non-western regions or integrated horizontally, which reflects the substantiality of the verification by the Mergers and Acquisitions Committee. However, the social relevance and the grey relevance between the listed companies supported by industrial policies and the Merger and Acquisitions Committee can have adverse effects on the substantive verification of the Mergers and Acquisitions Committee, which may lead to the distortion of the efficiency of market resource allocation in the M&A events. Besides, after the realization of M&A of listed companies supported by industrial policies, the listed company groups can carry out more substantive innovations.

Key words: industrial policy, the Mergers and Acquisitions Committee, administrative verification, mergers and acquisitions