Robert Noah, Ph.D.

Economics and finance consulting in commercial litigation

Robert Noah is a founding partner of Cambridge Finance Partners, LLC, an economics and finance consultancy. For more than 25 years he has worked on the economic and financial issues at the heart of major commercial litigation. Major financial institutions, corporations, and the United States government have retained him as a testifying expert. He now works principally as a consulting expert and strategic advisor to counsel.

In recent years Dr. Noah’s practice has centered on two areas: he advises banks in overdraft-fee class actions and in residential mortgage-backed securities litigation. He brings deep experience to both — dozens of RMBS matters for multiple banks, spanning government, private, and class actions, and years of overdraft-fee work involving the analysis of very large transaction databases, the identification of overdraft customer characteristics, and the behavior of banking customers under financial stress.

His work has reached well beyond those two areas: assisting the U.S. Department of Justice and taxpayers on tax litigations involving leasing, securitization, hedging transactions, economic substance, and business purpose; advising major law firms and their clients on a wide range of economics and finance matters; and developing dynamic hedging models for a major merchant energy company.

Dr. Noah is an expert in computer modeling and simulation as applied to finance. He has developed securities trading and abnormal-return models used in shareholder class actions and related claims, and has designed exotic option and derivative valuation tools. He is equally adept at large-scale database design and analysis — work that has proven critical in data-intensive litigation — with case experience involving client datasets of exceptional scale; he has supported discovery by masking and encrypting sensitive customer information while preserving data integrity for analysis.

Prior to founding Cambridge Finance Partners, Dr. Noah was a Senior Associate at Analysis Group/Economics, where he led litigation case teams on securities fraud, regulatory disputes, business valuation, cost of capital, and contract disputes, and consulted directly to a Fortune 100 finance company on litigation risk.

Dr. Noah received his undergraduate degree in economics from MIT and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. At Michigan, and later at the Milken Institute, he conducted research in corporate finance and industrial organization.

Dr. Noah’s paper, “Do Takeovers Create Value? New Methods and Evidence,” co-authored with Sanjai Bhagat, David Hirshleifer, and Ming Dong, won the McGraw-Hill Best Corporate Finance Paper Award from the Northern Finance Association in 2002. He is also co-author of the chapter “Estimating the Cost of Capital” in the Litigation Services Handbook (2001).

With Cambridge Finance Partners I have had a refreshingly high level of discourse and been provided with thoughtful and thorough analysis. They are a pleasure to work with.

— Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in Economics, 2001

Selected Testimony Experience

• Dana Corp. Bankruptcy
  U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York
  Expert for Dana Corp.
• Middlesex Retirement System v. Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company, et al.
  Middlesex Superior Court, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
  Expert for Mellon Financial Corp.
• The Procter & Gamble Company and Subsidiaries, and Procter & Gamble FSC v. United States of America
  U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio
  Expert for the United States
• Ambac Financial Group, Inc. v. United States of America
  U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York
  Expert for the United States
• BCP Voyager Master Fund SPC, LTD. v. The Royal Bank of Scotland plc, and RBS Securities, Inc.
  Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York
  Expert for the Royal Bank of Scotland
• Marc Block, et al v. RBS Citizens, National Association, Inc., d/b/a “Charter One”
  U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey
  Expert for RBS Citizens

Education

• Ph.D., Economics, University of Michigan, 1998
• S.B., Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992

Professional Experience

• Managing Director, Cambridge Finance Partners, LLC, 2001–present
• Senior Manager, Bates White & Ballentine, LLC, 2001
• Senior Associate, Analysis Group/Economics, 1999–2000
• Research Associate, Milken Institute, 1997–1999

Publications

• “Do Takeovers Create Value? New Methods and Evidence,” Journal of Financial Economics 76 (2005) 3–60, with Sanjai Bhagat, David Hirshleifer, and Ming Dong. Recipient of the McGraw-Hill Best Corporate Finance Paper Award, Northern Finance Association, 2002.
• “Estimating the Cost of Capital,” Litigation Services Handbook (2001), with Laura Boothman and Gaurav Jetley.

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