We investigate the timing of open market share repurchases and the resultant impact on firm liquidity. Using the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong's unique disclosure environment, we identify the exact implementation dates for more than five thousand equity buybacks. We find that managers exhibit substantial timing ability. Consistent with the information-asymmetry hypothesis, bid–ask spreads widen and depths narrow during repurchase periods. We decompose bid–ask spreads and show that adverse selection costs increase substantially as market participants respond to the presence of informed managerial trading. Our findings provide additional insight into how markets process information and have significant implications for corporate payout and disclosure policies.

The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of majority rule and Tiebout sorting within a system of local jurisdictions. The idea behind the estimation procedure is to investigate whether observed levels of public expenditures satisfy necessary conditions implied by majority rule in a general equilibrium model of residential choice. The estimator controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity among households, observed and unobserved characteristics of communities, and the potential endogeneity of prices and expenditures, as well as the self-selection of households into communities of their choice. We estimate the structural parameters of the model using data from the Boston Metropolitan Area. The empirical findings reject myopic voting models. More sophisticated voting models based on utility-taking provide a potential explanation of the main empirical regularities.