Anticipating the Financial Crisis: Evidence from Insider Trading in Banks

Peydró, José-Luis, Ozlem Akin and Marín, José M
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Jose M. Marin () and Jose-Luis Peydro

No 11302, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Banking crises are recurrent phenomena, often induced by ex-ante excessive bank risk-taking, which may be due to behavioral reasons (over- optimistic banks neglecting risks) and to agency problems between bank shareholders with debt-holders and taxpayers (banks understand high risk-taking). We test whether US banks’ stock returns in the 2007-08 crisis are related to bank insiders’ sale of their own bank shares in the period prior to 2006:Q2 (the peak and reversal in real estate prices). We find that top-five executives’ ex-ante sales of shares predicts the cross-section of banks returns during the crisis; interestingly, effects are insignificant for independent directors’ and other officers’ sale of shares. Moreover, the top-five executives’ significant impact is stronger for banks with higher ex-ante exposure to the real estate bubble, where an increase of one standard deviation of insider sales is associated with a 13.33 percentage point drop in stock returns during the crisis period. The informational content of bank insider trading before the crisis suggests that insiders understood the risk-taking in their banks, which has important implications for theory, public policy and the understanding of crises.

Keywords: Financial crises; Insider trading; Banking; Risk-taking; Agency problems in firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G01 G02 G21 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban and nep-fmk
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11302 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Anticipating the financial crisis: evidence from insider trading in banks (2020)
Working Paper: Anticipating the Financial Crisis: Evidence from Insider Trading in Banks (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11302

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().