The motivation and characteristics of firms that announce stock repurchase programs but do not carry them out are poorly understood. We conjecture that the long-term earnings quality of such firms is low, which makes them poor candidates for subsequent stock purchase. Their announcement is just...

Recent academic studies document that open market share repurchase announcements in the United States generate significantly lower returns than those reported in earlier studies. We find that the lower announcement return is associated with an increasing number of subsequent announcements in the...