Stakeholder orientation and insider trading

Abstract

Using the staggered adoption of constituency statutes across US states as an exogenous shock to stakeholder orientation, we examine its impact on opportunistic insider trading. We show a strong mitigating effect of stakeholder orientation on insider trading. We find that firms incorporated in states that passed stakeholder constituency statutes have a lower likelihood of opportunistic insider purchases, particularly in environments characterized by high information asymmetry and weak monitoring. Additionally, we find that stakeholder orientation mitigates other measures of financial misconduct, like securities class action lawsuits and financial misstatements. Our results are supported by a variety of robustness and causality tests.