This paper examines the association between insider trading before an earnings announcement and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Consistent with insiders' private information being incorporated into prices through their trading, we find PEAD is significantly lower...

This paper examines the association between insider trading prior to quarterly earnings announcements and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We conjecture and find that insider trades reflect insiders’ private information about the persistence of earnings news. Thus,...

This paper finds that the majority of stock price movements remain unexplained after controlling for both public and private information. This suggests that economists' inability to explain asset price movements is the result of either noise or naive asset pricing models.

We characterize how informed investors trade in the options market ahead of corporate news when they receive private, but noisy, information about (i) the timing of the announcement and (ii) its impact on stock prices. Our theoretical framework generates a rich set of predictions about the...