At NERA, Dr. Mayer directs projects in the areas of securities and finance. She has examined issues of market efficiency, class certification, liability, materiality, damages, settlement prediction, and claiming rates in hundreds of shareholder class actions. Cases involving credit crisis allegations, accounting restatements, public offerings (Section 11 and 12 claims, laddering allegations, stock acquisitions), cross-border trading, and options backdating are areas of special expertise. Dr. Mayer has done significant work in formulating measures of 10b-5 damages that are consistent with the Supreme Court's Dura ruling, decisions about netting of gains and losses, and alternative interpretations of PSLRA's bounce-back rule.
An expert on transactions data and market microstructure, Dr. Mayer developed the empirically-based Multi-Sector, Multi-Trader Model for estimating aggregate damages in securities class actions. A second-generation version of this model that she is now testing utilizes investor-specific trade records subpoenaed from a central source, an approach that replaces much of the guess-work in aggregate damages calculations with uncontestable data. Dr. Mayer has also investigated trading patterns in matters involving IPO allocation, execution quality, mark-ups, commissions, manipulation, penny stock fraud, short-swing profits, naked shorting, short sale tick-test violations, insider trading, and future-priced securities.
In other securities matters, Dr. Mayer has consulted on order flow, Regulation FD, transfer agent and depository practices, exchange listing, Nasdaq market share, and venture capital investments. Her valuation work includes measuring lost earnings for a securities firm and a stock exchange.
Dr. Mayer's practice also encompasses advisory work. She has designed exception reports for an investment bank, advised a self-regulatory organization on the pricing of its market data, developed compliance guidelines for a day-trading firm, and consulted with a corporate issuer on stock split-back decisions. Most recently, she has put forward proposals for overhauling the SEC's fraud-detection protocols in the wake of the agency's failure to uncover Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
Dr. Mayer came to NERA from the American Stock Exchange, where she was a Vice President. As head of the Research Department, she supported the Exchange's strategic planning, regulatory, marketing, and corporate communications efforts through research and analysis pertaining to listing, market quality, and order flow. In her prior academic career, Dr. Mayer was a Lecturer in the Department of Community Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an Instructor at Swarthmore College.
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