The goal of this study is to examine the stock price reaction to announcements of stock repurchases in the ASE, on the announcement day. This study contributes to the developing finance literature investigating the ASE, as well as to the international body of literature on share repurchases.
Our sample investigates the period before the financial crisis that began in 2008 and persists to generate negative effects on the capital market. The sample consists of firms announcing their intent to repurchase their own shares in the open market during the period 2000-2008. The ASE did not announce aggregate data during the period investigated thus, the data sample of announcement dates are manually collected from firm press announcements and announcements posted on the ASE web page (when available). Data on stock prices are from Thompson Financial. Daily and cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) are estimated using the market-adjusted returns model. The ASE General Index is used to calculate the market returns.
Findings show statistically significant positive returns. When the sample is divided into sub-groups based on the type of shareholder’s meeting (“annual” or “general) disclosing the intent to repurchase, companies that decide to repurchase their shares at “general” shareholder meetings have the highest returns. Also, we investigate the significance of other possible event dates (“board of directors”) and other sub-samples (“actual repurchases”, “announced repurchases”). The findings show that higher statistically significant returns are generated for the subgroup of firms where the “board of directors” date is considered as the disclosure date and the firm actually repurchased a percentage of their shares.
* I thank the Research Center of the University of Piraeus for its financial support.