We investigate whether voluntary corporate restrictions on insider trading effectively prevent insiders from exploiting their private information. Our results show that insiders of firms with seeming restrictions on insider trading continue to take advantage of positive private information while being more cautious when exploiting negative private information. The results suggest that insiders continue to exploit their informational advantages in a way that minimizes their legal risk. We also find that the degree of information asymmetry is significantly lower in firms with restriction policies and that corporate governance significantly affects firms' decisions to adopt these policies.

We examine whether CEO turnover and succession patterns vary with firm complexity. Specifically, we compare CEO turnover in diversified versus focused firms. We find that CEO turnover in diversified firms is completely insensitive to both accounting and stock-price performance, but CEO turnover in focused firms is sensitive to firm performance. Diversified firms also experience less forced turnover than focused firms. Following turnover, replacement CEOs in diversified firms are older, more educated, and are paid more when hired. Collectively, our results indicate that the labor market for CEOs is different across diversified and focused firms and that firm complexity and scope affect CEO succession.