Earnings Valuation and Insider Trading

Abstract

This study explores insider trading as a function of differences between managers' and the market's assessment of company earning components - specifically operating cash flows and accruals. It extends prior research by more comprehensively studying earnings components. It also builds a perspective of managers as sophisticated investors who, while engaging in earnings management, ultimately make insider trading decisions based on the divergence between their private valuation of earnings components and the market's. Thus managers may, seemingly counter-intuitively, engage in income-increasing earnings management and insider buying in the same period. Using 4,357 recent firm - years of observations, we find strong evidence that insider buying, but not selling, behavior is consistent with managerial insider trading based on a market valuation divergence of both operating cash flows and accruals, rather than on either element individually, or on managers' use of accounting discretion. We apply the methodological framework of the Mishkin (1983) test to address the hypothesis above. In particular, we assess the relations involving market pricing and characteristics of company earnings and insider trading as these relate to the fundamental idea of market valuation divergence.