“The terms “stock buyback” and “share repurchase” refer to the practice in which companies repurchase their own stocks from shareholders on the open market. This creates a scarcity of shares and boosts their value. Corporate executives benefit from this because share repurchases drive up the value of their stock-based compensation and give them an opportunity to cash out their personal stock holdings at a profit (Palladino 2018; Jackson 2018); furthermore, shareholders can benefit, but only if they sell their shares at the artificially inflated prices. This means that fewer corporate resources are available for growth-inducing activities, such as investing in research and development, spending on capital investments and new technologies, or creating new jobs and improving worker compensation.”