Academic Research
Paul Cadman Research
Professor Paul Cadman’s research sits at the intersection of law, markets, and decision-making. His work looks at how legal risk, public attention, and information flows shape behaviour across firms, industries, and investors. He is particularly interested in class actions, reputational dynamics, and how uncertainty travels through markets. He uses real-time data and applies empirical methods to test where risk concentrates, how it spreads, and what it means for capital allocation.
Broad research interests
- Litigation risk and corporate behaviour
- Class actions and collective redress
- Market reactions to regulatory and legal change
- Attention, media salience, and information demand
- Reputation and trust as economic drivers
- Information spillovers across firms and industries
- Risk transmission, contagion, and connectedness
- Forecasting and early warning indicators for decision makers
- Corporate governance, accountability, and stakeholder outcomes
Working Papers
[1] The Economic Impacts of Class Action Lawsuits: Evidence from Litigation Attention and Industry Information Spillovers
We study whether class action litigation attention contains forward-looking information for stock returns and whether it is associated with cross-industry spillovers. We construct a litigation attention index from Google Trends search activity related to class action lawsuits and examine its predictive content for next-month market and industry portfolio returns. Our forecasting design follows standard practice in the return predictability literature. We estimate expanding-window predictive regressions, compare forecasts to an expanding historical mean benchmark, and evaluate performance using out-of-sample R-squared and the Clark-West test for nested forecast comparisons.
Work in Progress
[1] Litigation Attention and Asset Prices: Evidence Across Assets
[2] When Legal Risk Becomes Market Risk: Class Actions, Public Attention, and Cross-Industry Transmission
If you would like to contact me regarding my research please email me at research@paulcadman.co.uk