Empirical evidence on the impact of European insider trading regulations

Abstract

We evaluate in this artic1e the impact of the regulations on insider trading introduced between 1988 and 1994 on ten European securities markets. We consider the temporal behavior and the distributions of abnormal returns, market models, and time series models of time-varying mean returns and volatility, and conclude that the bulk of the evidence suggests that these regulationsı have had little (if any) impact on the series of returns of the markets in our sample.