We provide evidence of unreported trading by corporate insiders in their own firm's shares and link this activity to future firm earnings and analyst forecast error. Unreported trading represent discrepancies between insider shareholdings from trades they report to the Exchange and their...

Theories of corporate boards assume that board members of a firm generate private information about the quality and performance of its CEO in the process of monitoring and advising him, and may use this information to decide whether or not to fire him. In this paper, I make use of data on...

We examine insider trading surrounding takeover rumors in a sample of 1,642 publicly traded U.S. firms. Using difference-in-differences regressions, we find that insider net purchases increase within the year prior to the first publication of a takeover rumor, particularly when rumor articles...

This study examines the effect of tax enforcement on informed trading by corporate insiders. Building on prior work suggesting that the tax authority can discipline managerial misconduct (Dyck and Zingales 2004; Desai, Dyck, and Zingales 2007), we hypothesize that the increased scrutiny from an IRS...

We examine whether Confucianism surrounding corporate headquarters affects informed insider trading. We empirically show that insiders in firms headquartered in regions with higher levels of Confucianism profit more in sales but not in purchases. We further investigate the cross-sectional...

This study analyzes the effectiveness of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD) in reducing possible profits from insider trading during voluntary tender offers with the purpose of delisting initiated by controlling shareholders. Exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the introduction...

This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of missing relative performance goals on insider trading. I find that CEOs who narrowly miss relative performance goals and hence receive a lower pay earn higher profits from their insider trades subsequent to the...

This paper examines the association between ineffective internal control over financial reporting and the profitability of insider trading. We predict and find that the profitability of insider trading is significantly greater in firms disclosing material weaknesses in internal control relative...

This paper examines the accruals anomaly in an agency context where managers of overvalued firms engage in various activities, including accruals-based earnings management, to sustain overvaluation. We use managerial trading to operationalize the empirical investigation, hypothesizing that...

The press has given the public the impression that insider trading is evil, unethical and illegal, when in fact such is not always the case. In some cases, insider trading is beneficial to the economy and to shareholders. Whether insider trading is harmful, unethical or illegal depends on many...