## 4 Empirical Analysis
### Sample Selection and the Source of Data  
Whether a company is marked as ST (an indicator of delisting risk) is taken as the identifier of financial crisis for Chinese listed companies, and the year in which a financial crisis occurs is defined as year T. This paper chooses listed companies that are newly labeled as ST in year T as the sample of ST listed companies, with a time interval from 2012 to 2021. The number of listed companies labeled as ST in 2012-2021 and the ratio of listed companies marked as ST to all A-share listed companies in that year are shown in Table 2. The number of listed companies labeled as ST in each of the 10 years is 550, and we finally obtained 541 listed companies labeled as ST by excluding 9 companies that had no traditional financial indicators data in year T-3. It can be found in this table that the total number of listed companies labeled as ST is very limited, which will lead to the imbalance of data between ST and non-ST listed companies. Therefore, this paper will explain how to solve the imbalance data problem in Section 4.4. Finally, this paper chooses 541 non-ST listed companies, the same number as the selected ST listed companies. It forms a total of 1082 samples, of which ST listed companies are in the positive category and non-ST listed companies are in the negative category.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline
**First Level Indicators** & **Specific Financial Indicators** & **Formulas** \\ \hline Profitability indicator & Operating profit ratio (\%) & Operating profit/Operating income \(\times\) 100\% \\  & Earnings per share (yuan) & An enterprise shall calculate basic earnings per share by dividing the net profit for the period attributable to common shareholders by the weighted average number of common shares outstanding \\ \hline  & Current ratio (time) & Current assets/Current debts \\ Solvency indicator & Oper-cash into current debt (\%) & Net cash flow from operating activities/Current debts \(\times\) 100\% \\  & Debt assets ratio (\%) & Total debts/Total assets \(\times\) 100\% \\  & Interest cover (time) & (Net income + income tax expense + Finance costs)/Finance costs \\ \hline Asset operating efficiency indicator & Accounts receivable turnover rate (time) & Operating revenues/Accounts receivable ending balance \\ \hline  & & \\ Cash flow quality indicator & Operating cash per share (yuan) & Net cash flow from operating activities/Total common share capital at the end of the year \\  & Cash rate of sales (time) & Cash received from sales of goods and services/Operating income \\ \hline Development capacity indicator & Net profit growth rate (\%) & Additional net profit in this year/Net profit in the previous year \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: The selection of traditional financial indicators and formulas.  
ST listed companies are companies that have been given special treatment for two consecutive years of losses, so the financial indicator data of T-2 years have already shown the financial crisis. In order to reflect the effect of early warning, this paper uses the financial indicator data of T-3 years. For instance, financial indicator data in 2017 are used, which were actually published in 2018, for the early warning analysis of listed companies labeled as ST in 2021. The traditional financial indicator data used in this paper are obtained from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research Database. MD&A text is crawled from CNINFO, which is processed as an emotional tone indicator through natural language. The financial news text data are obtained from the Chinese Research Data Services Platform, with the tone values calculated according to the emotional tone formula.