We investigate patterns of abnormal stock performance around insider trades and option exercises on the Dutch market. Listed firms in the Netherlands have a long tradition of employing many anti-shareholder mechanisms limiting shareholders rights. Our results imply that insider transactions are...

This paper studies insider trading quantities and dollar profits to measure the benefits insiders extract from their superior information. We find that several empirical results depend critically on using dollar profits instead of percentage returns. Dollar profits are economically small for a...

We provide an extensive analysis of the payout policy of U.S. banks during the crisis to examine potential risk-shifting and signaling motives of banks. We estimate an empirical model of bank payouts to assess the extent to which changes in payouts are commensurate with worsening fundamentals....

This paper sheds new light on the role bank executives played in the financial crisis. It examines whether they foresaw the poor performance of their own bank by analyzing their insider trading patterns. Insider trading during 2006 predicts stock returns during the crisis: a portfolio strategy...