The widely studied phenomenon of underpricing of new issues of common stock can be explained by underwriters' payoff asymmetry. Under uncertain investors' demand for a new issue, the underwriter's downside risk if he overestimates demand can be significantly larger than the upside potential when...

In order to have recoverable damages in a Rule 10b-5 action, plaintiffs must establish loss causation, i.e. that the actionable misconduct was the cause of economic losses to the plaintiffs. The requirement of loss causation has come to the fore as the result of the Supreme Court's landmark...

We propose in this paper the forward-casting method for estimating 10b-5 damages. We argue that this method compares favorably to two commonly used 10b-5 damage methods: constant dollar back-casting and the allocation method. Most importantly, both constant dollar back-casting and the allocation...