Consistent with the economics of crime approach, this paper finds that insider selling is decreasing in the perceived costs of potential private and public enforcement upon discovery of GAAP misstatements, and increasing in managerial private benefits as measured by the market reaction to the misstatement announcement. Additionally, insiders at fraud firms sell more on average, although the intensity of their trades is less likely to be associated with the magnitude of their private information. Further analysis suggests that managers perceive a higher cost of public enforcement in the post-Enron period.

Relying on the well-established theoretical result that uncertainty has a common and an idiosyncratic component, we propose a new measure of earnings forecast uncertainty as the sum of dispersion among analysts and the variance of mean forecast errors estimated by a GARCH model. The new measure is based on both common and private information available to analysts at the time they make their forecasts. Hence, it alleviates some of the limitations of other commonly used proxies for forecast uncertainty in the literature. Using analysts' earnings forecasts, we find direct evidence of the new measure's superior performance.