Impact of macroeconomic policy uncertainty on opportunistic insider trading

The macroeconomic policy environment affects the internal governance of microenterprises, which may provide opportunities for management to benefit from stock sales while decreasing its motivation to manipulate stock transac-tions. Using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2018, we study the impact of macroeconomic policy uncertainty on oppor-tunistic insider trading. The results show that macroeconomic policy uncer-tainty helps restrain the opportunistic trading of shares held by management. When macroeconomic policies are uncertain, enterprises improve their internal governance. Furthermore, strengthening equity gover-nance helps reduce management's opportunistic use of the uncertainty of the policy environment, highlighting the advantageous effect of macroeconomic policy uncertainty and helping regulators standardize managerial behavior and promote the governance effect of macroeconomic policy. (c) 2022 Sun Yat-sen University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecom-mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).