FinancialEcon.com

Dr. Robert Comment has consulted on a range of questions involving financial economics, and has provided expert testimony and analysis in a variety of forums, including arbitration panels, State Courts, U.S. District Courts, and U.S. Appeals Courts.   He has provided expert testimony, analysis, and opinion on the following topics:

• The materiality of corporate disclosures or omitted disclosures.
• The effect of sampling bias on purported stock-price evidence of loss causation or materiality (sampling from the population of approximately 70 reports issued by Jack Grubman regarding WorldCom).
• Whether a company used its best efforts, as called for in a registration-rights agreement, to facilitate public sales of restricted stock .
• The calculation, in  contract  disputes, of damages incurred by businesses .
• The true financial condition of a voluntary bankrupt seeking to reject a contract to supply electric power to a public utility.
• Whether a bank that put a retirement fund  into technology stocks at the peak of the tech-stock bubble fulfilled its  fiduciary duty under ERISA to to minimize the fund’s chances of a large loss.
• Whether a stockbroker reasonably should have pulled his customers out of technology stocks at the peak of the tech-stock bubble.
• The applicability of the theory of efficient markets during the tech-stock bubble.
• Broker-dealer sales practices, the difference between markup and the bid-ask spread, and the proper calculation of a broker’s markup when the prevailing market price  is stale.
• Stock-price manipulation during after-hours trading and the meaning of the term “NYSE closing price” in  language governing the terms of conversion of an issue of preferred stock.
• Investor losses from an accounting restatement for revenue recognition, and from falsely inflated revenue guidance.
• A company’s ill-gotten gains from the sale of securities during an accounting fraud, and an executive’s ill-gotten gains from stock sales made absent disclosure of an accounting fraud.
• The reasonableness of financial forecasts used to sell partnership interests.
• The value of veto power to a non-management equity investor following a leveraged buyout.
• The value of corporate control to a company’s founder, and the contribution of his personal effort to the appreciation in the market value of his stock holdings.
• The value of employee stock options.