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Author Bios
The following contributors comprise the SEC Settlements research team.
Dr. Elaine Buckberg
NERA Senior Vice President
+1 212 345 5326
elaine.buckberg@nera.com
Dr. Buckberg directs projects in the areas of securities economics, finance, valuation, and regulation. She provides expert testimony and litigation support in these areas as well as advisory consulting on risk management issues. Her testimony and litigation experience includes regulatory, criminal, and civil securities cases.
In securities litigation, Dr. Buckberg has led engagements involving hedge funds, subprime and structured finance securities, mutual fund market timing and fees, IPO allocation, broker-dealer disputes, insider trading, and disgorgement. She has extensive experience with shareholder class actions. Dr. Buckberg has also directed projects in complex commercial litigation involving valuation in mergers and acquisitions, fraudulent conveyance, and bankruptcy. In addition to expert testimony, Dr. Buckberg has made presentations on behalf of clients to federal and state securities regulators. Her advisory work includes integrated modeling of credit and market risk for the valuation of new financial derivatives.
Prior to joining NERA, Dr. Buckberg was a Vice President at Morgan Stanley, where she was first a currency strategist, then a regulatory policy specialist in the market risk division.
Dr. Buckberg began her career as an Economist at the International Monetary Fund, covering a broad range of issues including strategies for crisis resolution in the event of sovereign defaults, US tax policy, and the need for institutional reform in Russia in order to promote growth.
Her research has been published in International Finance, IMF Staff Papers, World Bank Economic Review, The Business Lawyer, Class Action Litigation, and The Corporate Compliance and Regulatory Newsletter. Dr. Buckberg is a member of the American Economic Association.
Dr. Buckberg received her PhD in economics from MIT with concentrations in macroeconomics and international finance. She received her BA in economics and
English literature from Yale University, magna cum laude and with distinction in English literature. She is fluent in Spanish and French.
Jan Larsen
NERA Senior Consultant
+1 212 345 3554
jan.larsen@nera.com
Mr. Larsen's work at NERA is in the areas of securities, finance, insurance, reinsurance, and mass torts. He has overseen projects involving complex economic issues including inflation per share and damaged trading volume in securities class actions, questions of market efficiency, earnings smoothing, finite reinsurance, insurer-reinsurer disputes, and mass tort valuation. The contexts for these projects have included shareholder class actions, criminal investigations, bankruptcy proceedings, and SEC enforcement actions. Mr. Larsen's work typically involves the utilization of mathematical and statistical techniques. He is currently included in the directory of expert services for the legal profession on BestLawyers.com.
Professor Baruch Lev
New York University
+1 212 345 3000
baruch.lev@nera.com
Dr. Lev is the Director of the Vincent C. Ross Institute of Accounting Research and the Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance at New York University Stern School of Business. As a Special Consultant to NERA, Dr. Lev specializes in the areas of corporate governance, earnings management, financial accounting, financial statement analysis, intangible assets/intellectual capital, capital markets, and mergers and acquisitions.
Dr. Lev is the author of several books, including Intangibles: Management, Measurement, and Reporting, Financial Statement Analysis: A New Approach and Accounting and Information Theory, and has published numerous articles in research publications including The Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting Research, The Bell Journal of Economics, and The Accounting Review. He was recognized by Accounting Today as one of the top 100 Most Influential People in the accounting profession in 1999 and 2000, and was awarded the Outstanding Educator Award by the American Accounting Association, an honorary doctorate by Vasaa University, Finland. Dr. Lev has recently testified several times before Congress on Enron and other accounting/auditing issues.
At NYU, Dr. Lev teaches courses in accounting and financial analysis. Dr. Lev has also held professorial positions at the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of California at Berkeley, and Tel Aviv University, where he served as Dean of the business school.
Dr. Lev received his Bachelor of Accounting degree from Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and his Master of Business Administration and his doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Paul Hinton
NERA Vice President
+1 212 345 5360
paul.hinton@nera.com
Mr. Hinton is a Vice President in NERA's New York City office, where he works on a wide range of advisory, litigation support, and testifying engagements. Since joining NERA over ten years ago, his experience has included securities and finance litigation, complex commercial disputes, product liability valuation, antitrust litigation, merger analysis, intellectual property valuation, regulatory matters, and transfer pricing. Mr. Hinton currently works primarily on securities, product liability, and complex commercial cases. He has testified in federal court, at deposition and before a legislative committee.
In securities litigation involving 10b-5 and section 11 claims, Mr. Hinton has developed analyses to provide an empirical basis for assessing liability, causation,
and damages. These cases typically demand event study analysis to quantify the impact of company-specific and market wide events on stock prices. Other
finance and commercial litigation cases have involved the valuation of a variety of assets and liabilities, such as entire business operations, complex
derivative securities, specific disputed contractual terms, and embedded intellectual property.
In product liability cases, Mr. Hinton has estimated the value of future personal injury claims associated with silicone breast implants, asbestos, building defects, and pharmaceuticals. He has provided product liability valuation analysis in connection with corporate risk management, bankruptcy estimation, insurance coverage disputes, fraudulent conveyance actions, corporate litigation, and policy analysis.
Mr. Hinton's specific experience directing securities and finance cases includes:
- Estimating the effect of untimely company specific news on the debt rating of a company, a decline in which caused a
stock price drop
- Analyzing alleged underpayment of a merger premium resulting from representations that the transaction would result in
a "merger of equals"
- Assessing the impact of the alleged failure to disclose bad debts and impairment of goodwill on a timely basis by an
internet business during the dot com bubble
- Separating the effect on the stock price of an alleged untimely disclosure from the effect of unrelated news about
company earnings using an analysis of the expected sensitivity of stock prices to earnings announcements (earnings-
response coefficients)
- Quantifying the impact on reputation and brand value of a health scare on a cruise operator through observing the stock
price drop and recovery for a sample of firms affected by similar brand events
Mr. Hinton has published in professional journals and regularly presents at conferences and professional meetings. Mr. Hinton received his BA in engineering science from Oxford University in the UK and his MA in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where his studies included economics and finance.
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