مقایسه تجربی بین عملیات وجوه ثابت و خرید مجدد سهام در کره

We examine stock repurchases in Korea. Korea allows unique mechanisms, stock stabilization funds. Our results indicate that these funds are treated by the market as a weak form of repurchase. Firms in Korea that announce open market repurchases repurchase 90% of the announced shares within 3 months. This compares to a smaller percentage in 3 or more years in the United States. The market response in Korea to a repurchase announcement is similar to the United States. Tests of the determinants of the market response to announcements indicate a positive relation between ownership concentration and the market response.

Open market stock repurchases by corporations have been studied extensively. However, until recently one limitation of the existing literature has been its almost exclusive focus on the United States market. Several recent studies report results from other countries that differ to varying degrees from results in the United States (e.g. Li and McNally, 1999, Ikenberry et al., 2000, Ginglinger and L'Her, 2002, Lamba and Ramsay, 2002, Oswald and Young, 2004, Otchere and Ross, 2002, Rao and Vermaelen, 2002, Zhang, 2002 and Hatakeda and Isagawa, 2004). While these studies serve to partially fill this gap in our understanding of the phenomena of open market stock repurchases, the question remains as to how well results derived using data from the United States apply to other countries. This is particularly true for countries whose financial markets are not as fully developed as the United States and in countries with legal systems based on something other than the Anglo-Saxon common law.

Fig. 2 shows the CARs for days −30 to +30 for announcements of stock stabilization funds and open market repurchases. Stock stabilization fund announcements during the period before open market repurchases were allowed are shown separately from announcements after open market repurchases were allowed. Table 3 compares the descriptive statistics for stock stabilization fund announcements before and after open market repurchases were allowed. In the period before open market repurchases were allowed, the announcement response pattern to a stock stabilization fund announcement is similar to the pattern seen in Fig. 2 for open market repurchases, with three exceptions. First, the announcement response appears to begin approximately 3 days before the announcement date instead of the beginning on the announcement date. Second, the response to a stabilization fund is on average of smaller magnitude than the response to an open market repurchase. For example, the 7-day CAR for stock stabilization funds using the window (−3+3) is 2.01%. Whereas the 6-day CAR using the window (0+5) for stock repurchases is 2.74% (see Section 4.2 below).