Insider trading regulation and trader migration
Journal of Financial Markets (2023)
Paper aims to analyse traders’ behaviour and their intention to migrate between markets, if they are free to trade in multiple markets with different prevailing insider trading regulations.
Recommended citation: Merl R., Palan S., Schmidt D., & Stöckl T. (2023). Insider trading regulation and trader migration, Journal of Financial Markets, DOI 10.1016/j.finmar.2023.100839 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138641812300037X
Discussions about insider trading regulation veer between the poles of forbidding insider trading to protect market integrity and allowing insider trading to foster informational efficiency. We study traders’ preferences for regulation by offering them concurrent markets with different regulatory regimes in an experimental setting. We find that informed traders’ preference for the unregulated market causes both informed and uninformed traders to be more active in the unregulated market. This market, thus, sees more trading volume, lower spreads, and less mispricing. Nevertheless, uninformed traders suffer greater losses in unregulated markets, while informed traders profit from the absence of regulation.
The supplementary material with all the data used and scripts for replications are provided at github and zenodo.