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...

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...

Disclosure of insider trading are ambiguous pieces of information, as liquidity traders may not assess whether the trades are motivated by significant privileged information related to the true share value. This paper establishes an algorithm, relying on Bayesian inference that represents the...

Through close interactions with their CEO and CFO, independent directors as well as subordinate executives can assess the overconfidence of their CEO and CFO. We show that independent directors and subordinate executives trade on this assessment, albeit differently. Independent directors of a...

This paper formalizes a novel form of corporate insider trading based on non-insider information. In our model, insiders make trading decisions in anticipation of activist intervention. Because insiders have access to private information about firm fundamentals, they can better separate...

We use observed insider trading data to estimate the start and end points of quarterly open trading windows, and find that voluntary insider trading restrictions reflect concerns about information asymmetry, the strength of external monitoring, and executives’ liquidity needs. We also identify...

Understanding the association between quasi-indexer ownership and insider trading is important given the externalities that insider trading can impose on shareholders, the importance of quasi-indexers in the capital markets, and their mixed monitoring incentives. The prior literature has...