We examine how financial statement informativeness, analyst following, and news relate to the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. Corporations’ timely disclosures of value relevant information and information collection by outsiders reduce information asymmetry, limiting insiders’ ability to trade profitably on private information. We use the profitability and intensity of insider trades to proxy for information asymmetry. We find that increased analyst following is associated with reduced profitability of insider trades and reduced insider purchases. Financial statement informativeness is negatively associated with the frequency of insider purchases. However, company news, good or bad, is positively associated with insider purchase frequency.

Assessing the predictive ability of behavioral finance theories using out-of-sample data is important. Otherwise, the potentially boundless set of psychological biases underlying the behavioral explanations for security price behavior can lead to overfitting of theories to data. We test pricing effects attributed to two psychological biases, representativeness and conservatism, which underlie many behavioral finance theories. Using trends and consistency of accounting performance, we look for the pricing consequences of representativeness and conservatism. We find mixed evidence consistent with behavioral finance. Specifically, the theories based on representativeness are not supported, but we find some evidence of the pricing implications of conservatism.