Over the last decade, financial economists have grown increasingly circumspect about the practical meaning of market efficiency due to the so-called joint hypothesis problem. In law, however, the concept has taken on an increasingly prominent role, meaning that the need for an operational...

This study examines the trading behavior of a large sample of individual (retail) investors around securities litigation events. We test the hypothesis that the response of these investors around the end of the litigation class period (at the time of a corrective disclosure) and the start of the...

This study distinguishes between announcements that precipitate federal class action securities fraud litigation, such as earnings surprises and restatements, and the later announcement that an issuer has been named as a defendant in such a lawsuit. The study documents a statistically...

Outsiders often have and seek to trade on a firm's material, nonpublic information. For example, lawyers have traded on advance information about the filing of a lawsuit, a social activist has announced a plan to trade on advance information of a boycott, and a hedge fund operator has engaged in...

Managers exercise considerable discretion over how they announce an accounting restatement in a press release. Some firms issue a press release that discloses the restatement in the headline (high prominence). Others provide a press release with a headline on a different subject (for example,...

This paper aims to understand why common law countries have more developed financial markets than civil law countries. One difference between these two legal origins is the procedure of evidence collection for a trial: It is adversarial in common law and inquisitorial in civil law. The...

In 1993, the Indian government introduced debt recovery tribunals to speed up the resolution of debt recovery claims larger than a threshold. This paper exploits the staggered introduction of tribunals across states and the link between overdues and claim size to implement a...

This paper analyzes how the adversarial and inquisitorial evidence collection procedures affect financial development. In investigating the true returns of insolvent entrepreneurs, the adversarial procedure relies on lawyers whereas the inquisitorial procedure relies on judges. Investors are...

This paper introduces a model of litigation in a growth framework. Investors use litigation to enforce their financial contracts with entrepreneurs. A contest ensues in which both agents hire lawyers to increase their probability of winning the trial. The issue and the cost of the contest...