Seminar – Litigating Innovation: Evidence from Securities Class Action Lawsuits

Professor Oliver Spalt, University of Mannheim

Low-quality securities class action lawsuits disproportionally target firms with valuable innovation output and lead to substantial shareholder value losses. We establish this fact using data on class action lawsuits between 1996 and 2011 and the value of newly granted patents as a measure of valuable innovation output. Our results challenge the widely held view that greater failure propensity of innovative firms drives their litigation risk. Instead, our findings suggest that valuable innovation output makes a firm an attractive litigation target. Our results support the view that the class action litigation system may have adverse effects on the competitiveness of the US economy.

Speaker bio

Professor Oliver Spalt holds the Chair of Financial Markets and Financial Institutions at the University of Mannheim. His broad research agenda focuses on the empirical and theoretical analysis of financial decision making of households, corporations, and investors. A particular focus of his work is behavioural finance, corporate governance, and financial institutions. His research is regularly presented at top international conferences and leading international business schools.

His work is published in the most prestigious academic journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. Professor Spalt has received numerous awards, including more than ten excellent teacher awards. While working at Tilburg University was repeatedly included in the “Top 40 economists in the Netherlands” list. He was the recipient of a prestigious VIDI grant from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Oliver Spalt ranks second among all researchers under 40 by A+ publications in the Wirtschaftswoche/Forschungsmonitoring BWL Forscher-Ranking 2019.

Before joining the University of Mannheim in September 2019, Professor Spalt was Professor of Behavioural Finance at Tilburg University. Prior to that, he has taught at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Mannheim.