Insider Trading: Information Contents and Managerial Incentives

This book explores the managerial incentive of insider trading by merging two parallels but related tracks: The information contents of insider trading which is a Finance subject backed by the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and the managerial incentives of insider trading which is a Management subject backed by the Agency Theory. In fact, the managerial incentives of insider trading only becomes testable once there is evidence that insider trading is profitable. In detecting the information contents of insider trading, this book differs in that (1) it employed three signal definitions, (2) it used daily data, (3) it used the security' return index, instead of share prices, (4) it used a most recent set of data, (5) it used the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to estimate the expected returns, (6) it reports the results within a shorter event window and (7) it provides, for the first time, empirical evidence on the Executive Share Options (ESO) transactions, in addition to ordinary shares. In terms of the managerial incentive part of this research, a major contribution of this research is that it provides evidence for the first time on the managerial aspects of insider trading.