Insider Trading and International Cross-Listing

Abstract

We use a unique dataset of all insider trading transactions in the UK over the period 1999-2003 and test the hypothesis that insider trading is informative. The study further concentrates on whether insider trades in cross-listed companies are less informative than insider trades in domestically quoted companies. Consistent with previous evidence, we find that for the sample as a whole, insiders are contrarians as they buy after significant price decline and sell after significant price increase. The announcement date and post-announcement date abnormal returns are positive in the case of buys and negative for the sells. However, we show that most of the event date and post-event date abnormal performance happens in domestically-listed companies. We find that the information content of insider trading in internationally cross-listed companies is relatively small. The results confirm bonding effects mainly in case of sales as we observe reduced abnormal returns. However, the effect in case of purchases is reverted and abnormal returns are significantly higher for cross-listed companies. We conjecture that such findings my result from asymmetric effect of possible expropriation. The expropriation may be more severe in case of sales when insiders cash out in the anticipation of bad news leaving the uninformed investors in long positions in loosing stocks. On the other hand the expropriation in case of purchases is less harmful when both insiders and outsiders gain from the price increase. Hence the bonding effect may be more pronounced for sales.