We use the controversial aspect of insider trading to analyze the impact of local social norms on insiders' profits. We argue that religiosity is a source of social norms curbing self-interested behavior and, accordingly, it limits corporate insiders' opportunistic trading on private...

We use a unique data set of more than 240,000 reported insider transactions across 15 European countries and the USA to analyze the link between country-level shareholder protection and abnormal returns following insider trades. We show that abnormal returns after insider transactions are...

Firms placed on negative credit watch face the threat of a credit rating downgrade. At the same time, they are given the opportunity to put recovery efforts in place to retain their current credit rating. In this paper, we test to what extent firms use earnings management as a short-term...

This paper studies cross-sectional determinants of the exposure of U.K. firms to Brexit, an event which resulted in an unprecedented rise in political uncertainty. We find that internationalization has a moderating effect on Brexit exposure which goes beyond the pure currency translation effect...

We use the largest cross-country sample of reported share transactions by corporate insiders to date to establish that insiders in the majority of European countries do not make statistically significant abnormal trading profits. This finding stands in contrast to the earlier evidence from the...

Within a sample of firms undergoing financial distress, where the incentive to send false positive signals is high, we show that insider trading serves as a credible information channel about potential recovery for outside investors. We employ credit rating downgrades as confirmation of the...

We analyze the importance of personal attributes in explaining the performance of reported share transactions by corporate insiders. While prior literature has focused on observable firm and trade characteristics, little effort has been made to understand how individual attributes, such as...