Alberto Manconi's Study Awarded by JFQA

Alberto Manconi, Assistant Professor at Bocconi's Department of Finance, is the winner of the JFQA 2019 William F. Sharpe Best Paper Award, along with co-authors Urs Peyer and Theo Vermaelen (both INSEAD), for the paper Are Buybacks Good for Long-Term Shareholder Value? Evidence from Buybacks around the World (Volume 54, Issue 5, October 2019, pp. 1899-1935).

The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (JFQA) publishes theoretical and empirical research in financial economics and the award, named after 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics recipient William F. Sharpe, "recognizes researchers who, through their articles published in the JFQA, have most contributed to our understanding of important areas of financial economics".

Share buybacks have received attacks by politicians and the popular press, with the accusation that corporate short-termism induces firms to distribute payouts to the shareholders to the detriment of investment and longer-term growth. Professor Manconi and his coauthors, in their award-winning paper, take this view to the data, studying the stock price performance following buyback announcements in all major stock markets. Their results suggest a more nuanced view. Buybacks are associated with long-term price increases, so perhaps they are not a symptom of short-sightedness; but those long-term returns depend on the liquidity of equity markets and the quality of governance, suggesting that the benefits of share buybacks are more likely to accrue to shareholders when financial markets work better.

"I'm especially happy about this paper", Professor Manconi says, "because it is still challenging to publish finance research based on non-US data. I interpret this prize as a sign that there is more acceptance and interest among academics for international data".