We analyze the trading of corporate insiders at leading financial institutions during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. We find strong evidence of a relation between political connections and informed trading during the period in which TARP funds were disbursed, and that the relation is most...

Corporate executives receive a considerable portion of their compensation in the form of equity and, from time to time, sell a portion of their holdings in the open market. Executives nearly always have access to nonpublic information about the company, and routinely have an information...

While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitates one particular form of opportunism: informed trading by corporate...