<p> This research informs an ongoing debate regarding a firm’s incentives to invest in information security. Previous research reported that data breaches have had a decreasing impact on a company’s stock price over time, leading researchers to conclude that market-based incentives are decreasingly effective. Some information security economists also suggested that further regulation is necessary because they found that capital market participants poorly accounted for the spillover effects of a breach—the effects of a breach that are external to the breached company. However, some studies indicate that sector-wide systematic risk could measure spillover effects and that the effects of a data breach on systematic risk may have changed over time. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively describe the relationship between the data breach of a firm and changes to the systematic risk of that firm’s sector. This dissertation used event studies of sector-wide systematic risk within American stock markets to measure the external effects of breaches that occurred in companies within the financial, technology, healthcare and services sectors. The use of a repeated measures analysis of variance between those event studies allowed examination of longitudinal changes to sector-wide systematic risk between 2006 through 2016. This analysis found that the breach of an individual company had a significant impact on the systematic risk for that company’s entire sector (1.08% in 2016) and that these impacts have increased over time (<i>p</i> = 0.015). The results were consistent across all measured sectors, without any significant correlation attributable to the scope of the breach. Together, these findings suggest that market forces are increasingly incentivizing sector-wide investment in information security. Further research should consider the potential for government enforced meta-regulation of sector defined information security standards.</p><p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10615009 |
| Date | 04 October 2017 |
| Creators | Pelletier, Justin M. |
| Publisher | Capella University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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