Foreign and Russian Studies of Share Buyback Practices: A View from the Corporate Governance Perspective

Abstract

The paper discusses the mechanism of shares buyback and its implementation in foreign countries and in Russia. The publication purpose is to study the practice of buybacks in the aspect of corporate governance, satisfaction of stakeholders interests being in the new economic realities by the impact of sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors use the method of content analysis of publications by Russian and foreign researchers based on Google Scholar since 1990 to 2020, considering buyback programs in relation to corporate governance and influence on stakeholders. Also, the authors analyze the state of the Russian stock market by capitalization, by the number of issuers of shares on the MICEX-RTS from 2013 to 2020. There are analyzed programs for repurchase of shares of Russian companies for the period 2018–2020. There have been put forward and tested three hypotheses related to the impact of sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic on the policy of implementing buyback deals by the companies. The “share buyback” is usually considered to a greater extent from the point of view of corporate finance in the Russian business field, outside the context of corporate governance and even more so outside of relations with stakeholders. There is a dominant approach to buybacks from the point of view of shareholders rather than from the point of view of stakeholders in Russian business practice. There is no discussion about the negative impact of buybacks on their interests in the public opinion and in the expert environment, due to the relative weakness of the positions of Russian stakeholders. The future research may focus on assessing the impact of share buyback programs on the risks system and benefits for financial and non-financial stakeholders. Also, there should be emphasized on studying the impact of share buybacks on the corporate governance quality and on studying their impact on top management remuneration, being assessed the effectiveness and efficiency of programs buybacks.