Our recent paper, Data as Liability, is now available as an Oxford Department of Economics discussion paper.
Research question
The paper asks whether AI creates a data-governance liability once it moves from invention into live business deployment. The outcome is not realised breach incidence; it is the attention firms give to breach-related risk in legally consequential SEC filings.
Main result
Using roughly 84,000 firm-years of US listed-firm annual filings, we find that AI adoption is the margin most closely associated with disclosed breach-risk attention. The signal is strongest where AI deployment is customer-facing, consistent with live data flows creating governance obligations.
Read more
See the full paper page for the data, method, results table and citation formats: Data as Liability. The PDF is also available here: aidata.pdf.