About

Mary Billings is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the NYU Stern School of Business, having joined the institution in 2007. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in Accounting from Indiana University, earned in 2007, along with an M.B.A. in Accounting and a B.S. in Finance from the same university. Prior to her tenure at Stern, she worked as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP. Professor Billings conducts empirical archival research that examines how the disclosure of accounting information influences the behavior of managers, investors, option traders, and other participants in capital markets. Her research particularly focuses on issues related to information uncertainty and various aspects of firms’ information environments. Throughout her career, she has received several awards and honors, including the Glucksman Award and recognition as one of Poets & Quants' Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors in 2016. She has also held visiting faculty positions, notably at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School during 2011-2012.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Law
• Accounting
• Economics
• Finance
• Natural resource economics
• Actuarial science
• Law and economics
• Ecology
• Financial system
• Geography

Selected publications

• Incidence, Risk, and Disclosure of Corporate Litigation: Insights from Federal Court Filings

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Incidence, Risk, and Disclosure of Corporate Litigation: Insights from Federal Court Filings

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2026-05-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT We assemble and describe a sample of 174,782 lawsuits filed against 218,437 public‐company lawsuit‐defendants in federal district court from 2006 to 2021. These lawsuits involve an array of allegations, including product liability, civil rights discrimination, contract breaches, improper compensation and labor practices, antitrust violations, corruption, securities violations, pollution, and intellectual property infringement. The sample exhibits rich variation across firms, industries, time, suit type, plaintiffs, and outcomes—reflecting not only firm activities but also social, political, and regulatory trends. Although many claims matter very little, some are important individually or in aggregate. We observe 23% of defendants experience a market value decline exceeding 10% of current assets around the lawsuit filing. Consistent with the notion that even low‐stakes claims, when numerous or persistent, can introduce frictions or reflect underlying issues, we find that aggregate legal exposure is associated with increased return volatility and decreased profitability. Subsequent tests indicate that materiality, public and private enforcement, and firms’ information environments (as well as other firm traits) are associated with managers’ decisions to disclose these claims. Collectively, our descriptive evidence establishes a foundation for further research into underexplored types of corporate litigation that represent a broad range of alleged wrongdoing and socially irresponsible behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• Incidence, Disclosure, and Risk of Corporate Litigation: Insights from Federal Court Filings

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Innovations in IPO Deal Structure: Do Up-C IPOs Harm Public Shareholders?

  Management Science · 2022-06-29 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines an innovation in capital formation that has spurred contentious debate: the Umbrella Partnership Corporation (“Up-C”) IPO. Advisors and underwriters argue that the Up-C deal structure is a driver of post-IPO value and, thus, is a value-enhancing means of raising capital that may be one solution to concerns regarding the drop in the number of publicly traded companies. Consistent with these claims, recent research suggests that organizing soon-to-be public businesses as pass-through entities (as is the case for Up-Cs) leads to superior future performance. Yet, broadening the analysis to consider abnormal stock performance and post-IPO litigation of a larger and more recent sample of exclusively Up-C IPOs, we conclude just the opposite. While the Up-C deal structure increases IPO valuations and predicts positive post-IPO operating performance, the return performance of Up-C IPOs indicates that Up-C deals harm public shareholders. Further, despite their superior earnings performance, Up-C IPOs face a significantly higher rate of post-IPO litigation as compared with non-Up-C IPOs. Because IPO investors seemingly do not anticipate the myriad ways in which the Up-C deal structure might facilitate opportunism by pre-IPO owners, they frequently turn to litigation as an ex-post settling-up mechanism. Consequently, our paper offers the first empirical evidence of downsides associated with the Up-C deal structure for public shareholders and, in so doing, affords the rarity of having academic evidence lead (as opposed to respond to) a controversial debate. This paper was This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the NYU Stern School of Business, the J. Reuben Clark Law School, and the Marriott School of Business. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4454 .

  PublisherDOI

• <span>Banks’ Lending and Deposit-taking Activities, Population Change, and the Evolving Exposures of Banks and Society to Climate Disasters</span>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Financial system
  • Finance
  PublisherDOI

• Investors’ response to the #MeToo movement: does corporate culture matter?

  Review of Accounting Studies · 2022 · 57 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Accounting
  • Business

  Abstract This paper provides evidence that the #MeToo movement revised investors’ beliefs about the costs (benefits) of fostering an exclusive (inclusive) culture, as reflected by the absence (presence of a critical mass) of women directors in the board room. Tracking a timeline of events associated with the #MeToo movement that begin with the Harvey Weinstein exposé in October 2017 in the New York Times , we document contrasting market reactions to the movement depending on the existing culture of the firm. Firms that historically excluded women from their board experienced a negative market response as momentum for the cause increased, whereas investors responded favorably to firms that historically embraced the inclusion of women on their boards. In contrast, we do not detect differences in the market’s response to randomly generated pseudo-events during the same time frame when comparing firms with exclusive and inclusive cultures. In the context of increased regulator attention to board gender diversity, as well as the ESG activist campaigns by large institutional investors, our study documents a shift in investors’ beliefs about the risks associated with sexual misconduct and about the value of having women in the boardroom shaping the culture of the firm.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Does litigation change managers’ beliefs about the value of voluntarily disclosing bad news?

  Review of Accounting Studies · 2021 · 31 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Accounting

  Abstract Research suggests that earnings-disclosure-related litigation causes managers to reduce subsequent disclosure, perhaps stemming from a belief that even their good faith disclosures will cause them trouble. This paper considers unexplored dimensions of disclosure and alternative channels of disclosure to provide additional evidence that speaks to how litigation shapes managers’ disclosure strategies. Consistent with Skinner (1994)’s classic legal liability hypothesis, we find that, while managers reduce and delay forecasts of positive earnings news following litigation, they increase the frequency and timeliness of their bad news forecasts. Moreover, many managers who were nonguiders prior to facing legal scrutiny begin guiding following litigation. Managers also maintain (if not increase) the information they provide via press releases and during conference calls following litigation. Supporting the notion that managers use disclosure to walk down expectations, additional analyses document an increase in the likelihood that lawsuit firms report earnings that beat consensus forecasts in the post-lawsuit period. Collectively, our evidence suggests that following litigation managers continue to view disclosure as a valuable tool that shapes their firms’ information environments and reduces expected legal costs. In so doing, it supports an important alternative viewpoint of how firms respond to litigation as well as the effectiveness of litigation as a disciplining mechanism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Investors’ Response to the #MeToo Movement: Does Corporate Culture Matter?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Does Pre‐<scp>IPO</scp> Financial Reporting Trigger Post‐<scp>IPO</scp> Legal Consequences?

  Contemporary Accounting Research · 2015-06-09 · 19 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Prior research suggests that the fear of litigation precludes most managers from manipulating earnings in the initial public offering ( IPO ) setting. Yet, managers' restraint is perhaps unwarranted: research has not yet linked instances of aggressive pre‐ IPO reporting to increased litigation risk. This paper investigates when aggressive IPO reporting triggers legal consequences. Examining 2,037 IPO s, we find that even when ex post evidence indicates the presence of earnings inflation, litigation is more likely to occur when investors have relied on the suspect earnings during the pricing process. Why might investors rely on some firms' abnormal accruals when valuing the IPO and yet discount the abnormal accruals of other firms? Our analyses suggest that IPO investors incorporate abnormal accrual information into IPO prices in situations where accruals are more likely to reflect information and where other sources of information to help investors make pricing decisions are lacking or are less reliable. In these situations, we find that abnormal accruals do positively correlate with future performance, validating investors' use of this information when pricing these offerings. Yet, when ex post performance reveals that these pre‐ IPO abnormal accruals were in fact inflated, we find that litigation emerges to allow harmed shareholders to recover losses incurred dating back to the pricing process—importantly, investors are only harmed if they used those abnormal accruals in pricing the IPO . Collectively, our evidence indicates that litigation in response to earnings inflation does indeed surface in the IPO setting—but only when investors need it to settle the score.

  PublisherDOI

• On guidance and volatility

  Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2015-08-20 · 158 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alexander Ljungqvist

  Stockholm School of Economics

  10 shared

• Matthew C. Cedergren

  Santa Clara University

  6 shared

• Karthik Balakrishnan

  5 shared

• April Klein

  5 shared

• Robert H. Jennings

  4 shared

• Bryan T. Kelly

  Capital University

  4 shared

• Melissa F. Lewis‐Western

  Brigham Young University

  4 shared

• Emanuel Zur

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Glucksman Award, Poets & Quants - Best 40 Under 40 Business…
• Daniel P. Paduano Faculty Fellow (2010)
• Ely Kushel Teaching Excellence Award (2010)
• William Panschar Undergraduate Teaching Award, Indiana Unive…