Managerial Timing and Corporate Liquidity: Evidence from Actual Share Repurchases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the timing of open market share repurchases and its resultant impact on corporate liquidity. We identify the exact implementation dates for over 5,000 equity buybacks on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong between November 1991 and August 1999. A bootstrapping method is used to distinguish managerial timing ability from a naive accumulation plan. The results show that managers exhibit substantial timing ability. Consistent with the information-asymmetry hypothesis (Barclay and Smith (1988 Journal of Financial Economics 22, 61-82)), we find strong evidence that bid-ask spreads widen and depths narrow during repurchase periods. We further decompose bid-ask spreads and show that the adverse selection component increases substantially when market participants respond to the presence of informed managerial trading. Overall, our market timing, spread and depth, and decomposition results reveal a coherent picture of managerial buyback behavior and its impact on firm liquidity. Our results have significant implications for corporate payout and disclosure policies.
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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 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".