Sooner or later: delays in trade reporting by corporate insiders

Until October 2004 corporate insiders in Germany were required to report trades in the shares of their firm 'without delay'. In practice substantial reporting delays were common. We show that the delays are systematically related to the characteristics of the firm. Delays are longer in widely-held firms and in firms using German accounting standards. This suggests that managers of these firms are less responsive to the informational requirements of the capital market. We further find that abnormal returns after the reporting date of an insider trade are independent of the reporting delay. This implies that prices are distorted in the period between the trading and the reporting date. This is a strong point in favor of regulation requiring and enforcing immediate disclosure of insider trades. --insider trading,directors' dealings,accounting standards

Noise and competition in strategic oligopoly

In this paper, we propose a model where N strategic informed traders who are endowed with heterogeneous noisy signals with different precisions compete in a market with a single risky asset. We explicitly describe the unique linear equilibrium that exists in this setup and derive its properties. Moreover, we focus on the effects of noise on the competition between traders. We show that noise softens the competition between traders. In particular, for N exceeding three and for certain sets of noise in traders' signals, each trader's individual profit is greater than the one obtained in the case of perfect information

Ownership structure and firm performance in Russia: the case of blue chips of the stock market

Based on panel data from 1995.1997, the paper focusses on the impact of ownership concentration on the performance of Russian non-financial privatised companies that constitute the group of .blue chips. of the country.s stock market. We consider three indicators of company performance . labour productivity, profitability, and Tobins.s q . and employ instrumental variables technique to correct regression results for endogeneity of ownership. We find that ownership concentration positively affects labour productivity, but has a negative impact on Tobins.s q. The relationship between ownership concentration and profitability follows a U-shaped pattern with the turning point at 56% concentration. These findings imply that ownership concentration results in higher technical efficiency of enterprises, but the benefits from productivity improvements do not accrue to all shareholders. This is consistent with the expropriation hypothesis that large owners use their power to extract private benefits of control

Redescribing Health Privacy: The Importance of Health Policy

Current conversations about health information policy often tend to be based on three broad assumptions. First, many perceive a tension between regulation and innovation. We often hear that privacy regulations are keeping researchers, companies, and providers from aggregating the data they need to promote innovation. Second, aggregation of fragmented data is seen as a threat to its proper regulation, creating the risk of breaches and other misuse. Third, a prime directive for technicians and policymakers is to give patients ever more granular methods of control over data. This article questions and complicates those assumptions, which I deem (respectively) the Privacy Threat to Research, the Aggregation Threat to Privacy, and the Control Solution. This article is also intended to enrich our concepts of “fragmentation” and “integration” in health care. There is a good deal of sloganeering around “firewalls” and “vertical integration” as idealized implementations of “fragmentation” and “integration” (respective). The problem, though, is that terms like these (as well as “disruption”) are insufficiently normative to guide large-scale health system change. They describe, but they do not adequately prescribe. By examining those instances where: a) regulation promotes innovation, and b) increasing (some kinds of) availability of data actually enhances security, confidentiality, and privacy protections, this article attempts to give a richer account of the ethics of fragmentation and integration in the U.S. health care system. But, it also has a darker side, highlighting the inevitable conflicts of values created in a “reputation society” driven by stigmatizing social sorting systems. Personal data control may exacerbate social inequalities. Data aggregation may increase both our powers of research and our vulnerability to breach. The health data policymaking landscape of the next decade will feature a series of intractable conflicts between these important social values

Impact and key challenges of insider threats on organizations and critical businesses

The insider threat has consistently been identified as a key threat to organizations and governments. Understanding the nature of insider threats and the related threat landscape can help in forming mitigation strategies, including non-technical means. In this paper, we survey and highlight challenges associated with the identification and detection of insider threats in both public and private sector organizations, especially those part of a nation’s critical infrastructure. We explore the utility of the cyber kill chain to understand insider threats, as well as understanding the underpinning human behavior and psychological factors. The existing defense techniques are discussed and critically analyzed, and improvements are suggested, in line with the current state-of-the-art cyber security requirements. Finally, open problems related to the insider threat are identified and future research directions are discussed

Insider Threat Detection using Virtual Machine Introspection

This paper presents a methodology for signaling potentially malicious insider behavior using virtual machine introspection (VMI). VMI provides a novel means to detect potential malicious insiders because the introspection tools remain transparent and inaccessible to the guest and are extremely difficult to subvert. This research develops a four step methodology for development and validation of malicious insider threat alerting using VMI. A malicious attacker taxonomy is used to decompose each scenario to aid identification of observables for monitoring for potentially malicious actions. The effectiveness of the identified observables is validated using two data sets. Results of the research show the developed methodology is effective in detecting the malicious insider scenarios on Windows guests

Assessing the Usefulness of Visualization Tools to Investigate Hidden Patterns with Insider Attack Cases

The insider threat is a major concern for organizations. Open markets, technological advances, and the evolving definition of employee have exacerbated the insider threat. Insider threat research efforts are focusing on both prevention and detection techniques. However, recent security violation trends highlight the damage insider attacks cause organizations and illuminate why organizations and researchers must develop new approaches to this challenge. Although fruitful research is being conducted and new technologies are being applied to the insider threat problem, companies remain susceptible to the costly damage generated by insider threat actions. This research explored how visualization tools may be useful in highlighting patterns or relationships in insider attack case data and sought to determine if visualization software can assist in generating hypotheses for future insider threat research. The research analyzes cases of insider attack crimes committed during the period of 1998 to 2004 with an information visualization tool, IN-SPIRE. The results provide some evidence that visualization tools are useful in both finding patterns and generating hypotheses. By identifying new knowledge from insider threat cases, current insider threat models may be refined and other potential solutions may be discovered