In this paper, we investigate whether directors' dealings reports are informative for outside investors. We analyze short-term announcement effects for eight European countries, namely Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.K, between 01/2003 and 06/2009. We find significant announcement effects in four out of eight countries after directors' dealings reports have been disclosed. Moreover, we conclude that for most countries the magnitude of the announcement effect depends on transaction size, firm size, book to market ratio, and multiple trades by different insiders on the same trading day. The results are stronger for purchases than for sales. For Ireland and Sweden we find tentative evidence that the corporate position of an insider is connected to the size of the announcement effect. Moreover, we find that abnormal returns after directors' dealings announcements are most pronounced in the healthcare, IT, and energy sectors.

This study examines long-term excess returns subsequent to directors' dealings announcements between January 2002 and December 2009 from 17 Western European countries. Excess returns are adjusted with equally weighted portfolios which are size and sector neutral. Our main findings show that long-term positive (negative) excess returns exist after insider purchase (sell) transactions. Moreover, we introduce a simple technique to detect the most informative directors' dealings where each transaction is categorized as a "low", "medium" or "high conviction" trade. Based on this categorization, out-of-sample "high conviction" insider purchases generate an average 12-month excess return of 20.94%, while "medium conviction" purchases generate 1.32% and "low conviction" purchases generate -3.40%.