WHICH INFORMATION MOVES PRICES: EVIDENCE FROM DAYS WITH DIVIDEND AND EARNINGS ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INSIDER TRADING

We examine the impact of public and private information on price movements using the thirty DJIA stocks and twenty-one NASDAQ stocks. We find that the standard deviation of daily returns on information days (dividend announcement, earnings announcement, insider purchase, or insider sale) is much higher than on no-information days. Both public information matters at the NYSE, probably due to masked identification of insiders. Earnings announcement has the greatest impact for both DJIA and NASDAQ stocks, and there is some evidence of positive impact of insider asle on return volatility of NASDAQ stocks. There has been considerable debate, e.g., French and Roll (1986), over whether market volatility is due to public information or private information-the latter gathered through costly search and only revealed through trading. Public information is composed of (1) marketwide public information such as regularly scheduled federal economic announcements (e.g., employment, GNP, leading indicators) and (2) company-specific public information such as dividend and earnings announcements. Policy makers and corporate insiders have a better access to marketwide private information (e.g., a new monetary policy decision made in the Federal Reserve Board meeting) and company-specific private information, respectively, compated to the general public. Ederington and Lee (1993) show that marketwide public information accounts for most of the observed volatility patterns in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets. Company-specific public information is explored by Patell and Wolfson (1984) and Jennings and Starks (1985). They show that dividend and earnings announcements induce higher than normal volatility in equity prices. Kyle (1985), Admati and Pfleiderer (1988), Barclay, Litzenberger and Warner (1990), Foster and Viswanathan (1990), Back (1992), and Barclay and Warner (1993) show that the private information help by informed traders and revealed through trading influences market volatility. Cornell and Sirri (1992)' and Meulbroek (1992) investigate the actual insider trading activities in a tender offer case and the prosecuted illegal trading cased, respectively. This paper examines the aggregate and individual impact of marketwide information, company-specific public information, and company-specific private information on equity prices. Specifically, we use the thirty common stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and twenty one National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) common stocks to examine how their prices react to information. Marketwide information (public and private) is estimated by the movement in the Standard and Poors (S & P) 500 Index price for the DJIA stocks and the movement in the NASDAQ Composite Index price for the NASDAQ stocks. Divedend and earnings announcements are used as a subset of company-specific public information. The trading activity of corporate insiders (major corporate officers, members of the board of directors, and owners of at least 10 percent of any equity class) with an access to private information can be cannot legally trade on private information. Therefore, most insider transactions are not necessarily based on private information. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that market participants observe how insiders trade in order to infer any information that they cannot possess because insiders tend to buy (sell) when they have good (bad) information about their company. For example, Damodaran and Liu (1993) show that insiders of real estate investment trusts buy (sell) after they receive favorable (unfavorable) appraisal news before the information in these appraisals is released to the public. Price discovery in a competitive multiple-dealership market (NASDAQ) would be different from that in a monopolistic specialist system (NYSE). Consequently, we hypothesize that NASDAQ stocks are affected more by private information (or more precisely, insider trading) than the DJIA stocks. In the next section, we describe our choices of the fifty-one stocks and the public and private information set. We also discuss institutional differences between the NYSE and the NASDAQ market. In Section II, we examine the implications of public and private information for the volatility of daily returns of each stock. In Section III, we turn to the question of the relative importance of individual elements of our information set. Further analysis of the five DJIA stocks and the four NASDAQ stocks that are most sensitive to earnings announcements is given in Section IV, and our results are summarized in Section V.