"In the first essay, ""Do Firms Knowingly Sell Overvalued Equity?"", I develop a simple equilibrium model which shows that insider trading around seasoned equity offerings (SEO) depends on both the quality of issuing firms and insiders' exogenous consumption shocks, neither of which are known by outside investors in the model. The empirical evidence indicates that insider trading is not reliably related to the future long-term stock returns of issuing firms even though it is reliably related to their announcement period abnormal returns. Issuing firms underperform their benchmarks regardless of the prior insider trading pattern. This suggests that insiders who have purchased shares before issuing do not realize that the market has overcapitalized prior good news, and are not knowingly selling overvalued equity."
Economics, Finance, Business Administration, Banking
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign