Book Description
This dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay, we examined the relation between insider trades and institution demand. The literature documents a strong inverse relation between insider trading and institutional demand, suggesting that institutions provide liquidity for insider trading. Motivated by empirical evidence that there is considerable variation of informativeness among institutions and insiders, this paper further examines the relation between insider trading and institutional trading by classifying insiders as opportunistic vs. routine traders and institutions as short-term vs. long-term investors. We find that the inverse relation between insider trading and institutional demand is mainly driven by long-term institutions. In fact, short-term institutions tend to trade in the same direction as opportunistic insiders whose trades are more informative of future stock price changes. The results are stronger for trades on small cap stocks. Further separating officers and directors vs. other insiders, we show that our findings are driven primarily by trades from opportunistic officers and directors.