Extant research commonly uses indicator variables for industry membership to proxy
for securities litigation risk. We provide evidence on the construct validity of this
measure by reporting on the predictive ability of alternative models of litigation risk.
While the industry measure alone does a relatively poor job of predicting litigation,
supplementing this variable with measures of firm characteristics (such as size, growth,
and stock volatility) considerably improves predictive ability. Additional variables such
as those that proxy for corporate governance quality and managerial opportunism do
not add much to predictive ability and so do not meet the cost–benefit test for
inclusion.