In this study, we determine why CEOs from lobbying firms receive higher pay compared to their non-lobbying peers. We investigate whether insider trading can explain high CEO pay. Using hand-collected firm-level lobbying data, we examine whether CEOs from lobbying firms engage in insider trading...

We investigate if prior professional legal education either restrains or increases the extent to which the insider trades of company executives and directors are informed. We show that executives and directors with legal expertise (lawyer-insiders) earn significantly lower abnormal returns than...

Corporate directors earn abnormal returns when they buy their own company's stock as insiders. Directors also outperform when they buy stocks with an interlock connection, where a co-board member is an insider. Directors do not consistently earn abnormal returns when they sell these connected...

This study examines whether the celebrity or star status of a chief executive officer (CEO) affects the informativeness of his insider trades. Using three different measures to identify star CEOs in a sample of S&P 1500 firms, we find that trades of non-star CEOs predict future abnormal returns...

This paper investigates whether political connections affect individuals' propensity to engage in illegal activities in financial markets. We use the French 2007 presidential election as a plausibly exogenous change in the value of political connections in a difference-in-differences...

This paper investigates whether directors' political connections affect their behavior in financial markets. We conjecture that directors feel protected by their political connections, which translates in lower perceived enforcement probability. We use the French $2007$ presidential election as...

We study corporate insider trading and information leakages within family firms. We find that the prof-itability of insider purchases of family insiders is higher compared to those of nonfamily insiders. In contrast, the profitability of insider sales of family insiders is lower compared to...

Insider trading during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study how corporate insiders benefit from information flows in their network of business contacts. I find that insiders at firms with activities in China sell more shares of their companies than...

We study whether industry familiarity is an advantage in stock trading by exploring the trading patterns of industry insiders in their own personal portfolios. To do so, we identify accounts of industry insiders in a large dataset provided by a retail discount broker. We find that insiders trade...

Using holdings-based performance measures, we test whether Norway's doubling of its female director network (through board gender-balancing) has increased female insider trading performance. We find that the gender-based insider performance has remained statistically indistinguishable from zero....