In practice, the share repurchase announcement is not a commitment to managers. To this end, the large difference between the actual and announced share repurchases is often observed in markets. In this paper, we explore the implications from actual share repurchase activities, different from the existing methods which focus on the announcements of share repurchases and hence largely ignore the managers' actual repurchasing activities. By considering actual share repurchases and controlling

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... ables, the new empirical evidence found in this paper clearly supports the agency and investor divergence of opinion hypotheses, but not for the information asymmetry hypothesis. JEL Classifications: G14, G20, G30