Market Reaction to Actual Daily Share Repurchases in Greece

Using a unique, hand-collected data set of actual daily share repurchases from the Athens Stock Exchange, we examine the stock market reaction around the disclosure date of actual share repurchases, the factors that affect the size of that reaction, and the motives behind share acquisitions. We find that different firms proceed to actual repurchases for different reasons: the results for the small firms and the firms with high book-to-market ratio repurchases are consistent with the signaling undervaluation hypothesis, while the results for the large firms and firms with low book-to-market ratio are in line with the price support hypothesis. In contrast to other studies, we find that long-term abnormal returns are higher for repurchasing firms compared to non-repurchasing controls and depend positively on the frequency of repurchases.