The Buyback Boom: New York Times Coverage of Stock Repurchasing Programs in the New Economy

Since the 1980s, stock repurchasing programs, also known as stock buybacks, have poured trillions of dollars in excess corporate cash into the pockets of shareholders. But corporations have not always been fixated on stock buybacks. The allure of stock buybacks is the byproduct of a fundamental shift in corporate governance that began in the mid-1980s, when shareholder primacy ideology took flight. In order to better understand how stock buybacks have been institutionalized as a practice, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of 232 randomly sampled New York Times news reports about stock repurchasing programs between 1984, when coverage of stock buybacks initially surged, and 2016. My study evaluated New York Times reporters’ moral stances toward stock buybacks by assigning one of three codes to each article: “morally neutral,” “morally favorable,” and “morally unfavorable.” Morally favorable and morally neutral articles function as proxy measures of Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) theory of institutionalization. Results show that the number of morally favorable articles about stock buybacks steadily grew over time, suggesting that New York Times reporters grew to accept and institutionalize stock buybacks as a practice