We examine corporate insider transactions around Sarbanes-Oxley §403 (SOX) regulatory regimes and subsequent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) media postings — and provide new evidence on the benefit/cost trade-off tension between private information transfer and stock trading costs. SOX increased...

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...

This article reviews the literature on insider trading by SEC employees and discusses ethical issues. It also provides links to more than 20 insider trading articles. Recent research has indicated that some employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission might have engaged in insider...

Insider trading has received a great deal of bad press in recent decades. Nearly every article in the popular press that has been written about it views the practice in a negative light. However, the economics and legal literature are mixed on the issue. This article examines the economics and...

This paper investigates whether corporate insiders trade when asymmetric information is high, using data on U.S. corporate insider transactions between 1986 and 2012. The key innovation of this paper is our proxy for asymmetric information relivol which measures deviations of idiosyncratic...

Managerial compensation theory proposes that both equity- and debt-type compensation should be included in the optimal compensation contract in order to align managers' interests with those of both shareholders and debtholders of the firm. However, this reasoning also suggests that the two forms...