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Regulations in the pre-Sarbanes–Oxley era allowed corporate insiders considerable flexibility in strategically timing their trades and SEC filings, for example, by executing several trades and reporting them jointly after the last trade. We document that even these lax reporting requirements were frequently violated and that the strategic timing of trades and reports was common. Event study abnormal re-turns are larger after reports of strategic insider trades than after reports of otherwise similar nonstrategic trades. Our results also imply that delayed reporting is detrimental to market efficiency and lend strong support to the more stringent trade reporting requirements established by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. JEL Classification: G14, G30, G32 Keywords: Insider Trading , Directors' Dealings , Corporate Governance , Market Efficiency
How do insiders trade?
(2016)
We characterize how informed investors trade in the options market ahead of corporate news when they receive private, but noisy, information about (i) the timing of the announcement and (ii) its impact on stock prices. Our theoretical framework generates a rich set of predictions about the insiders’ behavior and their maximum expected returns. Three different analyses offer empirical support for our approach. First, predicted trades resemble illegal insider trades documented in SEC litigation cases with insiders being more likely to trade in options that offer higher expected returns. Second, pre-announcement patterns in unusual activity in the options market ahead of significant corporate news are consistent with the predictions of our framework. We employ our approach to characterize informed trading ahead of twelve different types of news including the announcement of earnings, corporate guidance, M&As, product innovations, management changes, and analyst recommendations. Third, to address concerns that pre-announcement patterns are driven by speculation, we show that measures capturing trading activity in call (put) options with high expected returns predict significant positive (negative) corporate news in the aggregate cross-section.