Corporate Life Cycle Stage and Share Repurchases: Purposes, Completion Rates and the Listed Exchanges

Abstract

Taiwanese regulations mandate strict and detailed guidelines for repurchase programs. This provides us a superb opportunity to examine the corporate behavior by using a comprehensive dataset of more than 3,000 events of Taiwanese corporate repurchase programs from 2000 to 2011. We find that among firms announcing repurchase programs for the purpose of canceling shares or transferring shares to employees, a TWSE firm is more likely to do it for the purpose of canceling shares than an OTC firm. An OTC firm is more likely to do it for the purpose of transferring to employee than a TWSE firm. These results implicitly support the life-cycle argument of DeAngelo, DeAngelo and Stulz (2006).