Stock repurchases as an earnings management device [An article from: Journal of Accounting and Economics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Accounting and Economics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
We investigate whether firms use stock repurchases to meet or beat analysts' earnings per share (EPS) forecasts. We identify conditions under which repurchases increase EPS and document the frequency of accretive repurchases from 1988 to 2001. We find a disproportionately large number of accretive stock repurchases among firms that would have missed analysts' forecasts without the repurchase. The repurchase-induced component of earnings surprises appears to be discounted by the market, and this discount is larger when the repurchase seems motivated by EPS management, although using the repurchase to avoid missing analyst forecasts appears to mitigate some of the negative stock price response.