Insider Trading and Incentives to Manage Earnings

This paper evaluates two hypotheses about the relation between insider selling and earnings management in periods preceding poor corporate performance. Consistent with our litigation avoidance hypothesis, we provide evidence that managers manage earnings upwards after they have engaged in abnormally high levels of insider selling. In contrast, we find no support for the pump and dump hypothesis of earnings being managed before managers sell their equity. Our findings indicate insider trading provides managers with incentives to subsequently manage earnings upward, to distance their selling from the revelation of bad news and reduce the likelihood of reputation, employment, and litigation losses. We show these incentives co-exist and complement incentives to avoid default in a sample of 462 firms that experience technical default in 1983-1997. Our findings suggest that investors and those with oversight authority (e.g., boards of directors, auditors, and regulators) consider monitoring prior rather than contemporaneous insider-trading activity as a part of their corporate governance practices.