Open-market stock repurchases as signals for earnings and risk changes

Abstract

This paper is an empirical examination of the nature of information conveyed by open-market stock repurchase announcements. The findings weakly indicate that: (1) there are positive unexpected annual earnings in the repurchase announcement year and positive revisions of earnings forecasts by analysts around announcement dates, and that (2) repurchase announcements are followed by declines in the repurchasing firms' common-stock risk. In addition, a regression analysis shows that repurchase announcement returns are positively (negatively) correlated with the earnings (risk) changes conveyed by repurchase announcements.