| Technology and data are changing the way firms conduct business and interact with customers and employees. These changes have important implications for legal issues related to employment and discrimination. Regulatory authorities and policy makers have also increased their scrutiny of labor market antitrust issues. | High-stakes discrimination, employment, and labor antitrust cases require rigorous economic analysis to address complex economic issues. Cornerstone Research works with clients at all stages of the litigation process, combining cutting-edge statistical techniques with decades of experience. |
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
David Card
Class of 1950 Professor Emeritus of Economics,
Professor of the Graduate School,
Director, Econometrics Laboratory (EML),
University of California, Berkeley
David Card is a world-renowned economist with wide-ranging econometric and statistical expertise. Professor Card has served as an expert witness in antitrust, labor, consumer fraud and product liability, and statistical sampling matters.
In 2021, Professor Card was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his empirical contributions to labor economics, and particularly for pioneering research on social and economic forces that affect low-wage workers. His work covers topics that include immigration, wages, education, and gender- and race-related differences in the labor market. He also has expertise in complex statistical techniques such as machine learning (ML) algorithms, which are central to cases alleging algorithmic discrimination.
Professor Card has provided testimony in numerous matters, both in depositions and at trial. He testified in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College et al., a high-profile trial addressing Harvard College’s use of race in its undergraduate admissions process.
Professor Card coauthored the book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, and has coedited multiple books, including Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality, as well as several volumes of the Handbook of Labor Economics. He has published over one hundred journal articles or book chapters and has served as coeditor of Econometrica and the American Economic Review.
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Card taught at Princeton University. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. A former director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Labor Studies Program, Professor Card has been elected a fellow of the Econometric Society, the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Among his numerous awards, Professor Card received the American Economic Association’s 1995 John Bates Clark Medal, which honors the economist under forty whose work is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field. The Econometric Society has honored him with the Frisch Medal Award, and he received BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for his contributions to evidence-based economic policy.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Margaret S. Stockdale
Professor of Psychology,
Purdue School of Science,
Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Margaret “Peggy” Stockdale is an expert on employment discrimination. An industrial and organizational (I/O) psychologist with more than twenty-five years of experience, Professor Stockdale addresses a range of issues related to gender, race, and age discrimination; sexual harassment; organizational culture; and retaliatory behavior. She has testified in multiple employment discrimination matters, including class actions. Professor Stockdale directs the Women in Work Laboratory (WoW Lab), which conducts and disseminates research on gender issues in the workplace.
Professor Stockdale has broad expertise in human resources and organizational psychology research and methodologies. Her work covers subjects that include job analysis, personnel selection, promotion, compensation, turnover, workplace diversity, leadership, and social issues in the workplace.
Professor Stockdale has coauthored or coedited five books, including The Psychology and Management of Workplace Diversity and Sex Discrimination in the Workplace: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. She has contributed book chapters and published peer-reviewed articles on sex discrimination, sexual harassment, occupational and job segregation, and workplace policy, among other topics. She has served on the editorial boards of several academic and professional journals.
At IUPUI, Professor Stockdale teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on workplace diversity, I/O psychology, and social science research methods.
Professor Stockdale is a fellow at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the American Psychological Association.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Paul Oyer
The Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor and Professor of Economics,
Stanford Graduate School of Business;
Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research;
Stanford University
Paul Oyer is an authority on empirical labor economics. He focuses on labor and human resources issues, the economics of organizations, incentives, and matching (or two-sided) markets. Professor Oyer has been retained as an expert witness in a variety of matters related to labor economics and compensation, such as performance-based pay systems, overtime pay, alleged discrimination, the effects of “non-compete” agreements, class actions, and lost wages.
Professor Oyer analyzes career dynamics of highly skilled workers in competitive labor markets. Focusing particularly on legal and software engineering professionals, he assesses recruitment and employee incentive systems, including stock option programs. Recently, using data from the global freelancing platform UpWork, Professor Oyer wrote a report about the impact of the “gig” economy on flexible work arrangements and on improved “matching” between firms and workers. He teaches these concepts to MBA students at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Professor Oyer is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Labor Economics and is the author or coauthor of two books. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Finance, Research in Labor Economics, and the Journal of Financial Economics.
Professor Oyer began his career in management consulting and has also worked in the high-tech industry.
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Justin McCrary
Paul J. Evanson Professor of Law,
Columbia Law School;
Senior Advisor, Cornerstone Research
Justin McCrary is a leading expert on statistical methods and economic modeling, with a focus on antitrust and competition, labor, and consumer product matters. Professor McCrary has testified on class certification, antitrust, labor, and statistics issues. His wide-ranging experience covers numerous industries and markets, such as automotive, commodities, technology, healthcare, life sciences, finance, telecommunications, and retail.
Antitrust and competition
Professor McCrary testifies in complex antitrust and competition matters in various industries. His experience includes:
- In a significant matter in a high-tech industry, he addressed allegations of a conspiracy to fix prices and also analyzed and rebutted an opposing expert’s damages model. In another matter, he analyzed damages resulting from alleged collusion among pharmacies.
- On behalf of a global food and agriculture corporation, Professor McCrary evaluated an alleged conspiracy to manipulate wheat futures and options contracts.
- Professor McCrary has experience in multiple large and complex antitrust class actions involving financial markets. For example, he addressed statistical sampling of alleged cartel communications in In re Foreign Exchange Benchmark Rates Antitrust Litigation.
- Professor McCrary rebutted damages in a case alleging that a large software provider maintained its monopoly position through anticompetitive practices, including exclusionary contracting. The client prevailed in a confidential arbitration proceeding.
- Professor McCrary has provided testimony in antitrust matters involving intellectual property. For example, in Palm Beach Tanning Inc. et al. v. Sunless Inc., an antitrust counterclaim filed in response to a trademark case, he analyzed Section 1 and 2 tying allegations and issues related to the Robinson-Patman Act.
- In the telecommunications industry, Professor McCrary served as a consulting expert for the U.S. Department of Justice in its review of AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile.
Labor
Professor McCrary has wide-ranging labor markets expertise. His representative experience includes:
- Professor McCrary provided testimony in two seminal no-poach litigation matters involving the McDonald’s and Jimmy John’s franchises. In both matters, he analyzed the potential procompetitive benefits of the challenged clauses and opined on class certification issues. Class certification was denied in both cases, with both U.S. district court judges relying on Professor McCrary’s analyses in their opinions.
- Professor McCrary testified on class certification issues in a high-profile gender discrimination case focused on pay and promotion outcomes at a large U.S. retailer. The judge subsequently denied certification of the plaintiffs’ proposed class.
- Defense counsel retained Professor McCrary to analyze merits and damages issues in Morgan et al. v. U.S. Soccer Federation Inc., a gender pay discrimination class action. Citing Professor McCrary’s expert report in his order, the judge ruled in favor of the defendant’s motion for summary judgment.
- Defense counsel in Robinson et al. v. Jackson Hewitt Inc. and Tax Services of America retained Professor McCrary to analyze allegations that franchise no-poaching agreements restricted mobility and suppressed compensation.
Consumer fraud and product liability
Professor McCrary has testified in multiple matters alleging product liability, false advertising, and breach of contract. For example, in Beaty v. Ford Motor Company, a product liability matter involving alleged automotive defects, he provided class certification and damages rebuttal testimony.
Serving as an expert in high-profile consumer class actions, Professor McCrary has conducted empirical analyses and provided testimony on issues related to causation, liability, and damages. He has also rebutted damages models using a variety of empirical techniques, including conjoint analysis and hedonic regressions.
Statistical methods and analysis
The founding director of the Social Sciences Data Laboratory (D-Lab) at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor McCrary is an authority on high-performance computing and statistical techniques.
He has testified on sampling, probability theory, and statistical methods. In the closely watched matter, In Re Twitter Inc. v. Elon Musk et al., he was retained to address allegations regarding the statistical sampling methods employed by Twitter in analyzing spam and fake accounts.
Professor McCrary has examined the statistical evidence for healthcare providers’ alleged overbilling of Medicare in both government audit and False Claims Act (FCA) matters. He also has substantial experience with mortgage-backed securities matters, including rebuttals to analyses invoking matching estimators.
Research and teaching
Professor McCrary publishes research on econometric methods, including on measuring damages in antitrust litigation. In addition, his scholarship covers a wide range of topics, including employment discrimination, high-frequency trading, financial market structure, and monetary policy. A prolific author and coauthor, his work has appeared in leading journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Econometrics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Professor McCrary is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Before joining Columbia University, Professor McCrary taught at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.
Labor, Discrimination, and Algorithmic Bias Capabilities
Given the Supreme Court’s rulings on race-based admissions policies, institutions of higher education are now in the midst of a complex legal environment regarding race equity and admissions. Cornerstone Research can help institutions navigate this changing environment. We work extensively with admission data across a variety of graduate and undergraduate admissions programs. Leveraging our expert network and this expertise, our teams conduct econometric analysis to help institutions better understand their current admission policies and explore alternative approaches. We can help to quantify the impact of race and legacy status in existing admissions regimes as well as simulate alternative regimes where race or legacy status is not directly considered but where the increased emphasis is put on other characteristics.
Cornerstone Research’s experience in admissions analysis includes its support for David Card in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College et al., and Caroline Hoxby in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al. In each case, the judges favorably and extensively cited the experts supported by Cornerstone Research and issued a favorable verdict for our clients. Our work in these high-profile matters give Cornerstone Research unparalleled experience in building admission models and assessing the role of race in admission.
Discrimination cases—whether in hiring, compensation, promotion, or other selective processes like college admissions—typically hinge on empirical analyses designed to measure the impact, if any, of the alleged conduct on the relevant protected group. Our staff and experts are well-versed in the statistical and econometric techniques used to evaluate alleged discrimination in a variety of contexts, including promotion and pay, pre-litigation consulting on pay equity issues, and the use of race in college admissions and employment decisions.
The widespread use of big data and algorithmic decision-making raises new concerns about bias and discrimination in many business contexts, including advertising, consumer finance, employment, and healthcare. Cornerstone Research’s understanding of the economics of discrimination and the science of algorithms and big data provides insightful analyses of algorithmic bias and claims of discrimination.
Regulatory bodies and policy makers are increasingly focused on antitrust concerns in labor markets. We have worked on a variety of high-profile labor antitrust matters in both litigation and regulatory contexts, including merger evaluation, no-poach (both vertical and horizontal), and monopsony cartel matters. Through our expert network, we work with leading academics to capture the unique economics of labor markets when assessing allegations of anticompetitive conduct.
A rapidly growing body of litigation focuses on fundamental questions about the nature of employment, including whether workers are independent contractors or employees. Cornerstone Research staff and experts have worked on multiple, complex worker classification matters involving the gig economy and leading tech platforms, as well as more traditional worker classification matters.
Our expertise in class certification is central to high-profile employment matters. Working with academic experts, Cornerstone Research applies advanced statistical methods to assess whether common impact can be established using common class-wide evidence and methodologies. Our experience spans a variety of labor market contexts, including high-skill professions (such as finance or healthcare), retail and manufacturing, and tech platforms.
Cornerstone Research knows that addressing executive compensation issues requires understanding the market for executive talent and the determinants of appropriate compensation, such as performance, risk taking, firm viability, and shareholder rights. Because analysis and testimony in these cases may also call for accurate compensation valuation, our staff and experts are experienced in analyzing the incentives inherent in compensation structures. We evaluate all components of compensation, including noncash compensation such as stock options or nonmonetary benefits.
We have worked with leading economists to evaluate allegations that firms have violated labor laws. For example, we have determined whether a proposed class of workers falls into a relevant job description and therefore has standing to bring an underlying claim. Compliance cases can include statistical analysis of documents such as time cards and pay checks, survey analysis, or studying the workers’ day-to-day tasks.
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