Corporate Financing Decisions and Anonymous Trading

Abstract

This study considers a model in which a corporate manager has private information and engages in i) anonymous trading on personal account in the secondary market, and ii) the corporate issuance of new shares in the primary market. The paper examines the equilibrium tradeoff of insider trading profits against the manager's share of the corporate consequences of the primary issue. In the resulting equilibrium, managers, acting in their own best interests, seem to behave according to differing objective functions. In some cases, they seem to maximize intrinsic value, in others, insider trading profits seem to dominate, and still others seem to be concerned with both. Hence, the presence of anonymous trading around corporate financings brings into question the use of corporate objective functions with exogenously fixed weights.