We examine insider trading profitability and common identity between insiders and top executives. We argue that common gender and the resulting social connections influence access to private information, wherby insiders benefit from greater information-sharing with top executives of the same gender. Using a large sample of US firms between 1995 and 2016, we find higher (lower) insider trading profitability for female (male) insiders in the presence of a female CEO or CFO. We also find that, in isolation, other social and professional commonalities, such as age, ethnicity, having attended the same university or having worked at the same firm also increase insider profitability, albeit to a lesser extent. Our evidence suggests that some of these commonalities enhance the common gender effect when combined with it. We examine formal interactions and find that attending meetings and serving on committees with top executives of the same gender enables private information-sharing, consistent with gender acting as an informational channel. We also document greater clustering of insiders' trades around the trades made by common gender top executives. Our findings are consistent with flows of private information from CEOs and CFOs to less informed common gender insiders.

We examine how investment professionals assess the usefulness of financial accounting information depending on their information acquisition objectives and preparers' earnings management incentives. We conduct a survey experiment based on face-to-face interviews with investment professionals and document two main results. First, we find that, compared with investment professionals assigned a firm valuation objective, those assigned a managerial performance evaluation objective assess accounting information as significantly less useful. Second, we find no systematic evidence that preparers' earnings management incentives negatively affect investment professionals' assessments of accounting information usefulness. To elucidate this second finding, we conduct a large-scale follow-up online experiment. Our results continue to offer no support for the effect of earnings management incentives on investment professionals' assessments of accounting information usefulness, irrespective of preparers' corporate governance quality. Instead, we find that poor corporate governance, by itself, reduces the usefulness of accounting information to investment professionals.