Share Buybacks, Monetary Policy and the Cost of Debt

Assia Elgouacem and Riccardo Zago

Working papers from Banque de France

Abstract: Share buybacks have become common practice across U.S corporations. This paper shows that firms finance these operations mostly through newly issued corporate bonds, and that the exogenous variation in the cost of debt -due to innovations in monetary policy- is key in explaining managers' incentives to repurchase their own shares. Under our identification strategy, we find that firms are more likely to repurchase in periods of accommodative monetary policy when the yield on bond adjusts in the same direction. This behavior has macroeconomic implications as it diverts resources from investment and employment, thus reducing the transmission of accommodative monetary policy at firm-level.

Keywords: Share Buybacks; Monetary Policy; Corporate Yield; EPS Targeting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E52 G11 G32 G35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.banque-france.fr/sites/defaul ... ocuments/wp773_0.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfr:banfra:773

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Banque de France Banque de France 31 Rue Croix des Petits Champs LABOLOG - 49-1404 75049 PARIS. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael brassart ().