In our paper, Accounting and Litigation Risk: Evidence from Directors’ & Officers’ Insurance Pricing, forthcoming in the Review of Accounting Studies, we study whether and how financial reporting concerns and traditional measures of corporate governance are priced by insurers that sell Directors’ and Officers’ (D&O) insurance to public firms. As D&O insurers typically assume the liabilities arising from shareholder litigation, the insurance premiums they charge for D&O coverage reflect their assessment of a company’s litigation risk.
Estimation of ex-ante litigation risk has always been a challenge for empirical research. Past studies employ ex-post lawsuits to derive an ex-ante measure of litigation risk. In such studies, a litigation risk prediction model is first estimated with the dependent variable being whether the firm got sued ex-post. The predicted values of the probability of getting sued are then used as ex-ante measures of litigation risk in an empirical model. Such measures ignore lawsuits filed in other jurisdictions and also cannot distinguish between frivolous and serious lawsuits. We employ a market-based measure of ex-ante litigation risk; that is, the D&O liability insurance premium, which incorporates the ex-ante expectation of both the likelihood of lawsuits and the magnitude of damages. In the U.S., public firms routinely purchase D&O insurance coverage for their directors and officers for reimbursement of defense costs and settlements arising from shareholder litigation. Most shareholder litigation is settled within policy limits, with the D&O insurers primarily footing the bill. Therefore, we expect the D&O insurers to price financial reporting risk and corporate governance risk efficiently in order to compensate for their expected payout obligations in the case of lawsuits.
