Managerial Insider Trading and Opportunism

Abstract

This paper examines whether managers engage in opportunistic insider trading by measuring how their net open market purchases and holdings of own company stock change around acquisitions, seasoned equity offerings and share repurchases after controlling for their share and option holdings and noninformational motives for trading. On average, managers abnormally increase sales and reduce holdings around stock acquisitions and seasoned equity offerings but not around cash acquisitions and share repurchases. However the typical manager does not experience an economically significant change in ownership; more material ownership changes are limited to the subsets of the sample. These results suggest that the evidence for managerial opportunism is modest in magnitude and not pervasive in the sample.