Why Do Firms Repurchase Their Stocks? Evidence from an Emerging Market

Abstract

Though it has recently become a contemporary financial management tool, stock repurchase can be so dangerous that it may raise concerns about insider trading and manipulative transactions. In fact, such concerns underlie the most important critique of stock repurchase and justify its prohibition, at least its restriction, in several jurisdictions to date. Turkey, as one of these jurisdictions, has latterly been updated in order to allow open market stock repurchases with certain restrictive provisions. We intend to explore why Turkish firms decide to repurchase their stocks. Having employed a conditional logistic regression model, the results reveal that signaling hypothesis, i.e. undervaluation and positive information dissemination, and excess capital and free cash flow hypothesis, i.e. excess cash distribution, hold for Turkish companies.