How do managers' expectations affect share repurchases?

Summary: This paper examines how earnings expectations influence firms’ share repurchase decisions. I measure expectations using the difference between management earnings forecasts and corresponding consensus analyst forecasts. I find that firms repurchase significantly more shares when managers expect higher future earnings than the market does. To broaden the analysis, I use a large language model (RoBERTa) to extract embedded earnings expectations from earnings calls and show that these predicted expectations also forecast future share repurchases.

Presented at University of Technology Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Melbourne, Monash University, The Ohio State University, Midwest Finance Association Annual Meeting, Eastern Finance Association Annual Meeting, Financial Research Network Annual Meeting, AFA Annual Meeting Ph.D. Student Poster Session  Financial Management Association Annual Meeting, Southern Finance Association Annual Meeting, and Australiasian Finance and Banking Conference

Bank payout policy, regulation, and politics with Rüdiger Fahlenbrach and René Stulz
Summary: We investigate the impact of politics on banks through the lens of payouts. Large banks have lower payouts under Democratic presidents. After the Global Financial Crisis, regulators favored repurchases for large banks, and large banks permanently shifted the composition of their payouts. The greater flexibility of repurchases makes them more sensitive to shifts in politics than dividends. Large banks increased repurchases following the first election of Donald Trump, and their stock-price reaction to both elections of Donald Trump is larger than for small banks and industrial firms. 

Presented at NBER Summer Institute 2025 Corporate Finance*, Politics in Finance 2025 Conference at Georgetown University*, The Ohio State University* and Münster Banking Workshop*, FMA 2025 Annual Meeting (Scheduled)

Socially responsible investment and gender equality in the United States Census with Cynthia Yin

Summary: With administrative data, we test whether institutional ownership with a social preference is related to employee-level gender equality. We show that the gender pay gap does not have a significant relation with socially responsible investments. Next, we show that female directorship strengthens the relation between socially responsible investments and the gender pay gap.

( * : Presented by a coauthor)