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JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE
Insider Trading and Motivations for Earnings Management
Author(s): Lori Olsen, Mir Zaman
Citation: Lori Olsen, Mir Zaman, (2013) "Insider Trading and Motivations for Earnings Management," Journal of Accounting and Finance, Vol. 13, Iss. 3, pp. 51 - 66
Article Type: Research paper
Publisher: North American Business Press
Abstract:
We develop and test three possible hypotheses to explain motivations for earnings management. These
hypotheses are opportunism, signaling and smoothing. We examine the patterns of insider trading
associated with earnings management. Our main findings are: (1) the buying trades of insiders decrease
in frequency relative to selling trades as earnings are managed upwards, (2) after controlling for size, the
trading pattern of insiders still holds and (3) when partitioning the sample on past returns, the trading
pattern is still present within categories of past returns. These results are consistent with opportunism.
