Aggregate insider trading and market returns: The role of transparency

Using a sample of countries that require timely disclosures of insider trades, I investigate the effect of country‐level institutions that promote transparency on the extent to which aggregate insider trades predict market returns. I find that financial information transparency mitigates the predictive content of aggregate insider trades when markets are more likely to deviate from fundamentals (i.e., during market fads), and when there is greater co‐movement in stock prices. In contrast, there is some evidence that governance and investor protection mitigate the association between aggregate insider trades and future earnings surprises. Hence, holding constant the timely disclosures of insider trades, other capital market institutions play complementary roles in mitigating the informational frictions that give rise to the predictive content of aggregate insider trades.     

What Are the Determinants of Public Spending? An Overview of the Literature

Atlantic Economic Journal - The purpose of this paper is to present and assess the literature about the determinants of public spending. Its originality is the adoption of a methodological...     

On the protection of cultural goods

We identify cultural goods as goods which are valued differently by consumers at home than by individuals abroad, and which are produced under scale economies. It is shown that restrictions on the trade of cultural goods can raise welfare in both recipient and source countries.     

Indexed and non-indexed insurance and the growth of group life insurance

This paper provides empirical evidence regarding the hypothesis that expectations of inflation reinforces the need for indexed insurance and decreases purchases of fixed-dollar contracts. A comparison between term life insurance and group life insurance is developed to demonstrate the positive effect of inflation on the growth of group life insurance.     

Pro-social Motivation and the Delivery of Social Services

This article provides an overview highlighting some major themesof the recent literature on the role of pro-social motivationin the provision of social services. We focus on the insightsobtained from two alternative ways of modelling pro-social motivation;action-oriented and output-oriented altruism. This literaturehas implications regarding the design of optimal incentives,the selection of motivated agents and its interaction with monetaryrewards, and the optimal organizational form required to exploitsuch motivations. We also discuss the implications for governmentprovision of social services from the perspective of a parallelliterature that emphasizes the non-contractible nature of output,and contrast it with the implications derived from work emphasizingthe role of pro-social motivation. (JEL codes: H11, J32, J45,L31, L33)     

The Short‐Term Economic Impact of Levying E‐Tolls on Industries

TERM is used to analyse the short‐term regional economic impact of an increase in industries' transport costs when paying E‐Tolls. Market‐clearing and accounting equations allow regional economies to be represented as an integrated framework, labour adjusts to accommodate increasing transportation costs, and investments change to accommodate capital that is fixed. 1 1 TERM is a bottom‐up CGE model designed for highly disaggregated regional data. The Enormous Regional Model's originate from Horridge et al. ( 2005 ) and are better explained in Horridge ( 2011 ).
We concluded that costs from levying E‐Tolls on industries are small in comparison to total transport costs, and the impact on economic aggregates and most industries are marginal: investments (?0.404%), gross domestic product (GDP) (?0.01) and consumer price inflation (?0.10%). This is true even when considering costs and benefits on industries as well as consumers. Industries that experienced the greatest decline in output were transport, construction and gold. Provinces that are closer to Gauteng and have a greater share of severely impacted industries experienced larger GDP and real income reductions. Mpumalanga's decrease in GDP was 17% greater than Gauteng's.