Insider Trading And Corporate Disclosure Of Listed Companies In China

Changes of two fundamental institutions has release the insider trading activities since 2005, first, on 29th of April, 2005, China Securities Regulatory Commission (hereafter CSRC) initiated the reform of non-tradeable shares, which made the former non-tradable shares holded by largeshareholders can be traded on secondary market; second, on 27th of October of 2005, revised"Comporation Law"had promulgated and is putted into effect on 1st of Januaray 2006, which releases the prohibit on managers'trading their own firms'shares. These changes of institutions have driven huge insider tradings. According to Wind database, from the third quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2008, 836 companies abount 59.74% of all listed companies, have disclosed insider trading. Meanwhile, we find that the sensivity between insider trading and corporate disclosure increased, and cases of GaoxinZhangTong(002075) and SichuanJinDing(600678) which senior managers and largeshareholders took advantage of information to trade their own firms'shares getting abnormal return typically reflected this sensivity.As concerned with the poor investor protection, and the innate defects of corporate governance in China, the monitoring power on largeshareholders and managers is weak, this paper emphasizes that compared with developed security market, under the condition of poor investor protection, largeshareholders and managers have lower incentives to hide the behavior of insider trading based on corporate information disclosure and manipulation of corporate disclosure based on insider trading. And then this paper analysises the association between insider trading and corporate disclosure in the lens of the relationship between managers and largeshareholders.Chapter one is introduction, which introduces the institutional backgournd of this research, demonstrates briefly theoretical and practical meaning of this paper, and outlines the main train of thought of this research, and then I show that, under the special institutional background, investigations of the relationship between insider trading and coporate disclosure has very important contributions to positive agency theory, and this research can promote some regulation policy.Chapter two reviews prior literature, I classified the huge research on insider trading, based on the profitiablity of insider trading, and systematicly survey the way that insiders use information advantange, and the impact of corporate governance on insiders'behavior based on corporate disclosure. This paper compares prior research about how much profit insider trading can achieve and the ways of using information advantage and find out the inconsistent conclusions. And based on the survey of literature, I point out the weakness of prior studies.Chapter three is a theoretical framework based on the relationship of mangers and largeshareholders. In this chapter, I describe the special ownership structure, and apply the two type agency costs which prior studies have been proved. The type 1 agency problem exits between managers and shareholders. When ownership and controlling rights of firm is seprated, manager with the object that maximum his own unitilty mat not act as the interests of shareholders, and then incure the agency costs (Jensen and Meckling, 1976); The type 2 agency problems happens when ownership sreucture is relatively concentrated. La Porta, López-de-Silanes and Shleifer(1999) have investigate the ownership around the world, they find that, exclude UK and USA, dispersed ownership structure is rare, listed companies in many contry are controlled by some richest families. Although large shareholder can monitor managers'behavior, controlling shareholders may tunnel the listed companies and that behavior damage the outside shareholders'interests, and agency costs between large shareholders and minority shareholders rises.Chapter four is about corporate governance, insider trading and error of management earnings forecast. I investigate the impact of insider trading on management earnings forecasts error, and analysis corporate governance how to influence the sensivity of insider trading and error of management earnings forecasts. The finding suggests that when chairman of board, CEO. CFO and controlling shareholder trade their own firms'share, when chairman is also CEO, when shareholder hold high stake who trade their own shares, and when balance is low between non-trading shareholders and trading shareholders, the sensitivity of insider trading and error of management earnings forecasts increase significantly.Chapter five investiges the relationship between timing of insider trading and timing of management earnings forecasts, and analysis impact of corporate on that relationship. The finding suggest that, insider trading and corporate information disclosure hanve endogeneous relationship, that is, timing of insider trading can influence the timing of management earnings forecasts, that is, insiders always choose sell their shares after disclosure of good news, before the bad news, and buy before good news, after bad news. And then I find that, when insiders sell their shares, managers prefer to disclosing good news before its selling, and disclosing bad news after their selling.Chapter six studies the relationship between larges hareholders'sales and all kind of corporate infromation disclosure, including earnings announcements, management earnings forecasts, and material events announcements. This makes it be different from chapter five. Using simuletaneous equation modeling, I investigate the endoegeneous relationship between largeshareholders'sales and corporate disclosure. The reulsts indicate that, on one hand, corporate disclosure can impat significantly on largeshareholders'sales, after good news release or before bad news release, largeshareholders preference to selling equity increase significantly; on the other hand, large shareholders'sales can influence corporate disclosure, that is, before large shareholders'selling, managers prefer to release good news, and after large shareholders'selling, managers prefer to release bad news. Futhermore, I also find that large shareholders'selling can drive managers disclosing good news earlier and bad news later.Chapter seven is conclusion of this paper. In this chapter, I summarize the main results that this paper achieve, and show the contributions for related research, and give the policy implications. We can conclude that, regulatory agency should strengthen the monitoring power of insider trading, and voluntary disclosures, in order to avoid voluntary discolure becomes the tool of insider to achieve abnormal return of insider trading. And then I summarize the main limitations of this research, that is, because of limitation of data, I can't study the longterm effect of insider trading. And I suppose that the interaction effect of insider trading and other incentive of managers will become the director of future research.