The motivation and characteristics of firms that announce stock repurchase programs but do not carry them out are poorly understood. We conjecture that the long-term earnings quality of such firms is low, which makes them poor candidates for subsequent stock purchase. Their announcement is just...

The standard test for the pricing role of aggregate idiosyncratic risk in the conventional predictive regression considers aggregate total idiosyncratic risk a reasonable proxy for its undiversified component, which should be priced as theory suggests. However, when the priced component is...