This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to test whether standard illiquidity measures can detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I find that only absolute...

Big data is revolutionizing the finance industry and has the potential to significantly shape future research in finance. This special issue contains articles following the 2019 NBER/ RFS conference on big data. In this Introduction to the special issue, we define the "Big Data" phenomenon as a...

Using trade-level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information. We focus on large portfolio liquidations, which result in temporary drops in stock prices, and identify the brokers that intermediate these trades. We show that these brokers' best clients tend to...

We study whether industry familiarity is an advantage in stock trading by exploring the trading patterns of industry insiders in their own personal portfolios. To do so, we identify accounts of industry insiders in a large dataset provided by a retail discount broker. We find that insiders trade...

This paper assesses whether legal systems that protect outside investors from corporate insiders increase or decrease the rate of technological innovation. Based on over 75,000 industry-country-year observations across 94 economies from 1976 to 2006, we find that enforcing insider trading laws...

We analyze a model of informed trading where an activist shareholder accumulates shares in an anonymous market and then expends costly effort to increase the firm value. We find that equilibrium prices are affected by the position accumulated by the activist, because the level of effort...

This paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices, using a unique setting from the 18th century that, in many dimensions, is simpler and closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern-day markets. Specifically, the paper looks at a number of English securities that...

We extend Kyle's (1985) model of insider trading to the case where liquidity provided by noise traders follows a general stochastic process. Even though the level of noise trading volatility is observable, in equilibrium, measured price impact is stochastic. If noise trading volatility is...

Using a simple empirical strategy, we decode the information in insider trades. Exploiting the fact that insiders trade for a variety of reasons, we show that there is predictable, identifiable "routine" insider trading that is not informative for the future of firms. Stripping away these...

We show that a mutual fund's "stock selection skill" computed using the Daniel, Grinblatt, Titman and Wermers (1997) procedure can be decomposed into additional components that include impatient "informed trading" and "liquidity provision," thereby helping us understand how a fund creates value....