Quality of PIN Estimates and the PIN-Return Relationship

This paper provides new evidence concerning the probability of informed trading (PIN) and the PIN-return relationship. We take measures to overcome known estimation biases and improve the quality of quarterly PIN estimates. We use the average of a firm's PIN estimates in four consecutive quarters to smooth out the effect of seasonal variation in trading activities. We find that when high-quality PIN estimates are used, the Fama-MacBeth cross-sectional regressions show stronger evidence for the positive PIN-return relationship than documented in the prior literature. This finding is robust to controls for the January, liquidity, and momentum effects.The appendices for this paper are available at the following URL: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2218964" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2218964