Co-opting the Shareholder Value Movement: A Class Analytic Model of Share Repurchases

David M. Brennan
Additional contact information
David M. Brennan: Economics Department, Franklin & Marshall College, P.O. Box 3003, Lancaster, PA 17604-3003, USA, david.brennan@fandm.edu

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2008, vol. 40, issue 1, 89-106

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between labor, shareholders, and CEOs to reflect the simultaneous rise in share repurchases after 1980, the increasingly exploitative outcomes for labor, and the rise of CEO compensation. The paper finds that although institutional investors may have pressured firms to be more profitable, they were not powerful enough to appropriate all of the gains. Rather, capitalists (CEOs) have been able to partially co-opt the shareholder value movement at the expense of both labor and shareholders. Important components of this conclusion are the use of stock options and the benefits to capitalists for seemingly distributing funds to shareholders with share repurchases.

Keywords: institutional investors; share repurchases; stock options (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/40/1/89.abstract (text/html)

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:sae:reorpe:v:40:y:2008:i:1:p:89-106

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().