Economics Expert Allowed to Opine on Stock Inflation
Posted on October 8, 2025 by Expert Witness Profiler
Plaintiffs alleged that Defendants engaged in a scheme to defraud and made numerous materially false and misleading statements and omissions to investors regarding Acadia’s business and operations.
Defendants filed a motion to exclude the testimony and opinions of Plaintiff’s expert witness W. Scott Dalrymple. Specifically, Dalrymple was retained to analyze share price inflation and damages associated with Plaintiffs’ allegations.
Dalrymple purports to calculate the inflation in the stock price caused by these alleged misrepresentations by measuring the abnormal stock price decline following “curative events” that allegedly disclosed the truth behind the misrepresentations.
Economics Expert Witness
W. Scott Dalrymple is a Partner at BVA Group LLC (“BVA Group”). He is an economist and a CFA charter holder with extensive experience in economic, financial, and statistical analyses. During his career, he has worked on issues relating to the analysis of economic damages involving securities litigation, business valuation, structured finance, financial derivatives, antitrust, intellectual property, and breach of contract.
Dalrymple holds a Master of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance and Business Honors from the University of Texas at Austin.
Discussion by the Court
To begin with, Defendants challenged the admissibility of Dalrymple’s opinions under Rule 702. As grounds, Defendants contended that Dalrymple did not offer opinions of loss causation which rendered his opinions on damages irrelevant and unhelpful; that his opinions are unreliable because he failed to disaggregate the impact of the corrective disclosure from any other non-fraudulent information; and that his opinions are results oriented (i.e., not reliable) because he measured inflation using a four-day window for one of the alleged corrective disclosures.
Plaintiffs, however, noted that Dalrymple conducted multiple event studies in which he considered and disaggregated confounding information and that the only assumption in Dalrymple’s analysis is that the jury will find the alleged misstatements were, in fact, actionably false and misleading.
For the most part, Defendants’ arguments challenged the factual bases for Dalrymple’s opinions, they go to the weight, rather than the admissibility, of his testimony.
The Court found that Plaintiffs have shown by a preponderance of the evidence that Dalrymple is qualified, his opinions have a reliable basis in the knowledge and experience of his discipline, and that he will testify to knowledge that will assist the trier of fact in understanding the evidence and deciding why Acadia’s stock price fell when it did and the issue of damages.
Held
The Court denied the Defendants’ motion to exclude the testimony of Plaintiff’s expert witness W. Scott Dalrymple.
Key Takeaway:
To determine reliability under Rule 702, the Court must determine not whether the expert’s opinion is correct, but rather whether it rests upon a reliable foundation, as opposed to, say, unsupported speculation.
The facts of this case do not show that Dalrymple’s opinions are “so fundamentally unsupported that they can offer no assistance to the trier of fact.”
Case Details:
| Case Caption: | St. Clair County Employees’ Retirement System V. Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. Et Al |
| Docket Number: | 3:18cv988 |
| Court Name: | United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Nashville Division |
| Order Date: | October 01, 2025 |
