Tiger Woods’ marital infidelity has destroyed as much as $12 billion (£7.5 billion) in stock value, according to two US professors.

The University of California economic academics, Christopher Knittel and Victor Stango, found that Woods’ sports-related sponsors suffered the most from the public outing of the golfer’s “transgressions”.

“Our analysis makes clear that while having a celebrity of Tiger Woods’s stature as an endorser has undeniable upside, the downside risk is substantial, too,” Professor Stango told McClatchy Newspapers.

The men studied how share prices in Woods’ sponsors performed compared with the broader market in the two weeks since the golfer’s car crash.

“Mr. Woods’ top five sponsors (Accenture, Nike, Gillette, Electronic Arts and Gatorade) lost 2-3 percent of their aggregate market value after the accident, and his core sports-related sponsors EA, Nike and PepsiCo (Gatorade) lost over four percent,” the authors write in their paper Shareholder Value Destruction following the Tiger Woods Scandal.

“The pace of losses slowed by December 11, the date on which Mr. Woods announced his leave from golf, but as late as December 17 shareholders had not recovered their losses.”

Overall, they say the losses ranged between $US5 billion (£3.1 billion) and $US12 billion (£7.5 billion).

The authors warn that their results are statistically “noisy” due to the study method they use and the fact that most sponsors are divisions of larger listed companies.