Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
Event studies have become increasingly important in securities fraud litigation after the Supreme Court’s decision in Halliburton II. Litigants have used event study methodology, which empirically analyzes the relationship between the disclosure of corporate information and the issuer’s stock price, to provide evidence in the evaluation of key elements of federal securities fraud, including materiality, reliance, causation, and damages. As the use of event studies grows and they increasingly serve a gatekeeping function in determining whether litigation will proceed beyond a preliminary stage, it will be critical for courts to use them correctly.
This Article explores an array of considerations related to the use of event studies in securities fraud litigation. It starts by describing the basic function of the event study: to determine whether a highly unusual price movement has occurred and the traditional statistical approach to making that determination. The Article goes on to identify special features of securities fraud litigation that distinguish litigation from the scholarly context in which event studies were developed. The Article highlights the fact that the standard approach can lead to the wrong conclusion and describes the adjustments necessary to address the litigation context. We use the example of six dates in the Halliburton litigation to illustrate these points.
Finally, the Article highlights the limitations of event studies – what they can and cannot prove – and explains how those limitations relate to the legal issues for which they are introduced. These limitations bear upon important normative questions about the role event studies should play in securities fraud litigation.
Keywords
Civil procedure, evidence, Supreme Court of the United States, SCOTUS, Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., Basic, Inc. v. Levinson, fraud on the market, event study methodology, fraudulent information, statistical power, significance, error rates, one-sided SQ test, securities fraud, 10b-5 litigation
Publication Title
Texas Law Review
Repository Citation
Fisch, Jill E.; Gelbach, Jonah B.; and Klick, Jonathan, "The Logic and Limits of Event Studies in Securities Fraud Litigation" (2018). All Faculty Scholarship. 1655.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1655
Included in
Civil Procedure Commons, Courts Commons, Econometrics Commons, Evidence Commons, Law and Economics Commons, Litigation Commons, Securities Law Commons, Statistical Methodology Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons
Publication Citation
96 Tex. L. Rev. 553 (2018)