The high incidence of financial statement restatements and high-profile accounting scandals in the last decade has
spurred a great deal of attention from the media, investors, legislators and researchers. A major concern is that managers
not only ‘‘cook the books’’ to meet market expectations but they also profit from the violations through informed insider
trading. This potential profit is not without risk, however, as trading on the knowledge of existing accounting
misstatements by the firm’s executives unquestionably fits the SEC’s definition of illegal insider trading.
Consistently,
prior research has documented a material increase in the probability of private litigation (Johnson et al., 2007) and other
significant adverse effects (Wu, 2003; Palmrose et al., 2004; Hribar and Jenkins, 2004) in response to revelations of GAAP
violations. This paper uses financial statement restatements to examine managerial incentives to engage in insider trading
on material private information.