Bank bailouts and corporate insider trading during the financial crisis of 2007–2009

Jagolinzer et al. (The information content of insider trades around government intervention during the financial crisis. Working paper, 2014) examine insider trading at banks that were bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers. They provide evidence that insiders of bailed-out banks profitably purchased their banks’ shares over a 9 month period after the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was announced in October 2008. They find that the purchases were profitable for up to 12 months after the purchases. However, Liu et al. (J Bank Finance 37:5048–5061, 2013) find that shareholder gains at the bailed out banks occurred only after the banks paid back the TARP funds, which in most cases occurred after 2010. In this paper we extend Jagolinzer et al.’s (2014) analysis to financial institutions that did not receive TARP funding as well as to non-financial firms. We find that insiders of the non-TARP financial and the non-financial firms traded their shares profitably after the TARP program was announced. Insider share purchases at these firms were highly profitable for up to 12 months after the purchases. However, insider purchases at the bailed-out banks were slightly profitable only for a month after the purchases, after which the shares that were bought declined in value. Our results for the TARP banks do not corroborate Jagolinzer et al.’s (2014) results, but are consistent with the evidence in Liu et al. (2013) and several other papers that examine the wealth effects of TARP program announcements and fund repayments.