Trading When You Cannot Trade : Black-Out Periods of Italian Firms

This paper is part of general debate about corporate governance and focuses on a mechanism of self-regulation suggested to Italian firms to avoid market abuses: the use of black-out periods during which insiders are temporarily prohibited from trading on the market. The study shows that although companies with a high percentage of independent directors and an internal audit committee are more likely to adopt closed periods insiders do not really abstain from trading as requested by the codes of internal dealing issued by their firms to comply with Italy's Code of Best Practice