Abstract: Share repurchase is a kind of supply adjustment behavior in stock markets and has the advantage of being a price stabilizer. The existing researches mainly explore the motivations for corporate share repurchase from their own factors of the enterprises. Then, will the company’s stock repurchase decision be influenced by other companies in the same industry? What is the mechanism of this impact? By making use of the data from Chinese listed companies from 2005 to 2021, this study explores the peer effect and its impacting mechanism of share repurchase at the industry level. The findings show that there is a significant peer effect in the share repurchase behaviors of China’s listed firms, and there is also a peer effect in the amount and the frequency of share repurchases. The mechanism analysis reveals that the peer effect of share repurchase in listed companies is generated by the learning and imitating behaviors and the competitive pressure among the companies in the same industry. The moderating effect analysis reveals that the more abundant a company’s cash flexibility reserve is, the higher the media attention received by the peer companies, and the stronger the peer effect of share repurchase. The findings of the economic consequence analysis show that the share repurchases based on the peer effect have an increasing effect on corporate value. To this end, it is necessary to guide enterprises to make stock repurchase decisions that meet their substantive needs, while at the same time strengthening the supervision of the share repurchase behavior of the listed companies.

Key words: share repurchase, peer effect, study and imitation, competitive pressure