Paul A. Gompers

Eugene Holman Professor of Business Administration,
Harvard Business School,
Harvard University

Paul Gompers provides expert testimony in securities and valuation cases in a variety of industries. He has addressed issues of the valuation of public and private companies, loss causation, factors affecting public company securities prices, market efficiency, the custom and practice of venture capital and private equity organizations, as well as the terms and conditions of employment agreements at entrepreneurial firms.

Professor Gompers has served as an expert witness in high-profile cases. In Hsu et al. v. Puma Biotechnology Inc. et al., a rare securities class action trial, Professor Gompers testified on loss causation and opined that the plaintiff had failed to reliably quantify damages for the allegedly corrective disclosures.

In the first post-merger appraisal litigation of a public company to reach a decision in trial outside Delaware, the judge accepted Professor Gompers’s fair value analysis. Professor Gompers also rebutted the claims made by the dissenters’ experts.

Other high-profile cases include:

Professor Gompers’s research focuses on the structure, governance, and performance of private equity funds; sources of financing, incentive design, and performance of private firms; and long-run performance evaluation for newly public companies. His work on private equity funds has examined the relationship between general partners and their portfolio companies, as well as the relationship between institutional investors and private equity fund managers. Additionally, Professor Gompers has examined the relationship of corporate governance and firm performance as well as the role that institutional investors play in public equity markets.

He was a director of research at the Harvard Business School for nine years, has served as faculty chair of the M.B.A. Elective Curriculum, and as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also has served as a consultant, board member, or advisor to numerous companies, investment banks, private equity funds, and venture capital firms.

Professor Gompers has coauthored several books and has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed finance and economics journals. He is an associate editor and referee for a number of leading academic journals.

Education

Practices