Valuing Human Rights: The Effect of Supreme Court Decisions Regarding the Alien Tort Statute on Corporate Stock Returns

Abstract

This paper seeks to quantify the financial impact of corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute on foreign and domestic corporations. I test the effects of landmark Supreme Court cases which progressively reduced the Alien Tort Statute’s ability to hold corporations liable for human rights abuses committed abroad in the courts of the United States. Expanding upon prior empirical evaluations of the Alien Tort Statute, I employ an event study methodology on the stock returns of mining and manufacturing firms traded on the New York and London Stock Exchanges. In the days following the Court’s ruling on Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. in 2013 and Jesner v. Arab Bank, PLC in 2018—decisions which reduced human rights liability risk for foreign corporations under the Alien Tort Statute—I find evidence that foreign corporations operating in countries with low levels of human rights protections experienced higher cumulative abnormal returns than domestic competitors operating in similar environments. I also find that these decisions resulted in higher cumulative abnormal returns for corporations operating in countries with higher human rights ratings, suggesting these decisions may have an adjacent effect of encouraging more responsible investments. Amidst widespread legal debate, these findings show empirically that corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute had a significant financial impact. More broadly, they show that decisions made by the United States Supreme Court regarding human rights influence international market outcomes.