Directors’ dealing influence on stock price development in the German stock market

Abstract

We analyze the influence of insider transactions on the evolution of the underlying securitys stock price for public companies in the German market. We implement towards this goal three well-established test statistics from the event study methodologies and apply them on a data set containing approximately 3000 announcement events from around 100 German companies, documenting the results accordingly. Our main findings confirm the contrarian behavior of the insiders for the companies in the data set considered. Furthermore, we find evidence of market reactions to insider announcements in terms of non-zero abnormal returns, but not to the extent to which we would be able to formulate a consistent trading strategy based on it.