This study examines the spillover effect of securities litigation. Peers of the sued firm have negative three-day abnormal returns around case filings and continue underperforming over sixty trading days. Peers also improve financial reporting quality and change qualitative disclosure...

This is the first comprehensive examination of the stock option backdating litigation. One reason why it is important to study the stock option backdating litigation is that it was a blend of financial reporting fraud and executive misappropriation of assets. Sometimes the executive...

We analyze class action litigation as a corporate governance device. Firms that have lower internal governance standards and those with fewer external monitors are more likely to be indicted. Lawsuits announcements are salient information to the market, as firms, on average, lose 12.3% without a...

Investors tend to litigate large stock price declines, i.e., file “stock-drop lawsuits”. Enterprising plaintiffs' attorneys seek to take advantage of the stock market declines that have accompanied the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 by filing class action lawsuits. However, it is less clear...

This paper investigates whether shareholder class action litigation affects the takeover candidacy, premium, and completion rate of mergers and acquisitions involving defendant target firms. We use a comprehensive data set of publicly traded U.S. firms that became the targets of takeover bids...

Using comprehensive patent lawsuit data from 2000 to 2014, we find that a stock portfolio consisting of firms involved in patent lawsuits provides significantly positive stock returns (between 0.56% to 1.02% per month) in the following year. We propose and examine several possible explanations...