This paper extends the signaling hypothesis by investigating the signal strength adjustment behavior with respect to the announcement of an open market repurchase (OMR). Given that an OMR is a non-binding commitment for the repurchasing firm, the stock market would likely scrutinize the credibility of the undervaluation signal from the OMR announcement of the firm. This may compel the manager to engage in various mechanisms in order to strengthen the undervaluation signal of the OMR announcement. This paper investigates whether managers of repurchasing firms would modify the terms of the OMR program when the simultaneous announcements of bad news threaten the credibility of the signal from the OMR announcements. Consistent with our signal strength adjustment hypothesis, we find that managers of repurchasing firms increase (shorten) the repurchase plan size (period) with the magnitude of bad news in the simultaneous announcements. Our results also show that the stock market reacts positively to the signal strength adjustments, indicating that they are informative to the market. These results hold after using various techniques to control for sample selection bias.

This paper examines whether the stock market considers the firm's reputation established through a history of management earnings forecasting when it evaluates open market repurchase announcements. We refer to this established reputation as the firm's “forecast reputation”. We find that while the stock market considers the firm's “repurchase reputation” (proxied by prior repurchase completion rates), it also considers the firm's forecast reputation established from the accuracy of prior management earnings forecasting, suggesting a spillover effect of forecast reputation. Further, interaction test between the two reputation variables reveals that the market reacts more to the firm's forecast reputation when its repurchase reputation is low. Additional analyses suggest that when a firm announces a share repurchase program for the first time (i.e., when there is no repurchase reputation), investors turn to the forecast reputation within the firm as an alternative source of reputation, on which the credibility of repurchase announcements is assessed. Overall, our study provides evidence that firms establish a reputation in the market through multiple sources of announcements.