The Announcement Effect of Open-Market Share Buybacks: The Case for European Firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a comprehensive sample of 1830 open-market repurchases of 15 European countries encompassing the period from 1998 until 2013, we analyzed the magnitude and determinants of the share price reaction on announcement. Our results indicate that buyback announcements in Europe lead on average to a significantly positive abnormal return of 0.92% on announcement day, however, decreasing in firm size and announcement frequency. Additionally, our findings show that the market does not particularly greet the distribution of excess cash to shareholders, but rather when companies take advantage of undervalued stock as market-to-book values are inversely related to announcement returns. Looking at the companies’ leverage ratios, the motive of capital structure optimization cannot be supported by the empirical findings. Lastly, with respect to managerial market timing ability we could not observe that buybacks are following a period of share price underperformance, concluding that managers are not able to time the implementation of buyback programs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".