What Do We Know About Stock Repurchases?

Stock repurchases by U.S. companies experienced a remarkable surge in the 1980s and ‘90s. Indeed, in 1998, the total value of all stock repurchased by U.S. companies exceeded for the first time the total amount paid out as cash dividends. And the U.S. repurchase movement has gone global in the past few years, spreading not only to Canada and the U.K., but also to countries like Japan and Germany, where such transactions were prohibited until recently. Why are companies buying back their stock in such amounts? After dismissing the popular argument that stock repurchases boost earnings per share, the authors argue that repurchases serve to add value in two main ways: (1) they provide managers with a tax‐efficient means of returning excess capital to shareholders and (2) they allow managers to “signal” to investors their view that the firm is undervalued. Returning excess capital is value‐adding for two reasons: First, it helps prevent companies from pursuing growth and size at the expense of profitability and value. Second, by returning capital to investors, repurchases (like dividends) play the critically important economic function of allowing investors to channel their investment from mature or declining sectors of the economy to more promising ones. But if stock repurchases and dividends serve the same basic economic function, why are repurchases growing more rapidly? Part of the explanation is that, because repurchases are taxed as capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, repurchases are a more tax‐efficient way of distributing excess capital. But perhaps even more important than their tax treatment is the flexibility that (at least) open market repurchases provide corporate managers‐flexibility to make small adjustments in capital structure, to exploit (or correct) perceived undervaluation of the firm's shares, and possibly even to increase the liquidity of the stock, which could be particularly valuable in bear markets. For U.S. regulators, the growth in open market stock repurchases raises some interesting issues. Perhaps most important, companies are not required to (and rarely do) furnish their investors with details about a given program's structure, execution method, number of shares repurchased, or even its duration. Policy regulators (and corporate executives as well) should consider some of the benefits provided by other systems, notably Canada's, which provide greater transparency and more guidelines for the repurchase process.