Academic Impact: SEC cites UB School of Management research in ruling

Regulators were concerned that these blank-check companies were misleading investors, and a recent study from Michael Dambra, the Kenneth W. Colwell Chair of Accounting and Law in the UB School of Management, found that the more revenue growth a company projects when it announces it will be acquired by a SPAC, the more investors buy the SPAC’s stock—and the less likely those projections are to come true.

So Dambra and his study co-authors, Omri Even-Tov, assistant professor of accounting; and Kimberlyn George, PhD candidate, both from the University of California Berkley Haas School of Business, drafted a comment letter to the SEC summarizing their findings. As a result, the SEC removed safe harbor protections for companies that go public via a SPAC, and cited their letter 17 times in their ruling.