In 1981-1983, these 222 companies spent 5% of profits on buybacks and 50% on dividends in 2016-2018, the same companies paid out 64% as buybacks and 52% as dividends. Data on the 222 companies in the S&P 500 Index that were publicly listed from 1981 through 2018 show that buybacks as a form of distribution of corporate cash to shareholders became widespread in 1984 and subsequently were done in addition to (not instead of) dividends, with the dollar value of buybacks first surpassing that of dividends in 1997. In 2009-2018 the 466 companies in the S&P 500 Index that were publicly listed over the decade expended $4.0 trillion on buybacks, equal to 52% of profits, plus $3.1 trillion on dividends, representing another 40% of profits. Many of the largest companies in the United States are highly financialized, distributing almost all, and often more, of their profits to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and cash dividends. economy, but they had 35% of all business-sector employees, 40% of payrolls, and an estimated 46% of revenues. These enterprises were only about one-third of 1% of all firms in the U.S. In 2016, 2,102 companies had 5,000 or more employees in the United States, with an average of almost 21,000 per firm. economy depends heavily on the resource-allocation decisions of very large corporations. Download as PDF Distributions to shareholders
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