Résumé en anglais

Research on the impact of open market share repurchases has been hindered by the lack of dataavailable on actual share repurchases in many countries, including the US. Using a previouslyunused database containing detailed information on 36,848 repurchases made by 352 French firms,we show that corporate share repurchases have a significant adverse effect on liquidity as measuredby bid–ask spread or depth. Our results also indicate that share repurchases largely reflect contrariantrading rather than managerial timing ability.