CEOs are “lucky” when they are granted stock options on days when the stock price is lowest in the month of the grant, implying opportunistic timing and severe agency problems (Bebchuck, Grinstein, and Peyer, 2010). Using idiosyncratic volatility as our measure of stock price...

This study examines long-term excess returns subsequent to directors' dealings announcements between January 2002 and December 2009 from 17 Western European countries. Excess returns are adjusted with equally weighted portfolios which are size and sector neutral. The main findings show that...

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 investigate the performance and its link with information asymmetry, corporate governance and legal enforcement of insider transactions in 36 countries covering 10 Asian countries, 20 European countries and 6 countries in the rest. The results show that abnormal returns after insider trading...

This paper studies how insider trading intensity is affected by the joint effects of competition and regulation. Prior theoretical research has found that, in the absence of regulation, more insiders leads to more insider trading. We show that optimal regulation, however, features detection...

We examine the private information associated with insider trades using a Chinese data set. Insider buys positively forecast individual stock returns and insider sales negatively forecast individual stock returns. Classifying insiders as corporate managers and institutional investors, we find...

This paper shows that insiders trade on public information just after earnings announcements. Using a sample of US stocks, we analyze insider trading in the context of short-selling activity and show that insiders sell significantly more often and more shares when short sellers are also highly...

We provide evidence on anchoring biases in insider trading using a stock's 52-week high. When stock prices are close to their 52-week highs, insiders are reluctant to purchase stocks and willing to sell them. Similarly, when stock prices are far from the 52-week highs, they are willing to buy...

This paper analyzes stealth trading by corporate insiders in US equity markets. Stealth trading is the practice to break up trades into sequences of smaller trades. We find that stealth trading is pervasive and distinguish two explanations. The first argues that insiders break up trades in order...

We present evidence of investors underreacting to the absence of events in financial markets. Routine-based insiders strategically choose to be silent when they possess private information not yet reflected in stock prices. Consistent with our hypothesis, insider silence following routine sell...