This paper attempts to help explain the unforecasted, excess' personal income tax revenues of the last several years. Using panel data on executive compensation in the 1990s, it argues that because the gains on most stock options are treated as ordinary income for tax purposes, rising stock...

Over the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the share of executive compensation paid through stock options. In this paper, we examine the extent to which tax policy has influenced the composition of executive compensation, and discuss the implications of rising stock-based pay...

Although exercise prices for executive stock options can be set either below or above the grant-date market price, in practice virtually all options are granted at the money. We offer an economic rationale for this apparent puzzle, by showing that pay-to-performance incentives for risk-averse...

Under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 123, the grant date value of executive stock options excludes the value of any reload feature because, at the time of writing the standard in 1995, the Financial Accounting Standards Board believed it was not feasible to value a reload...

We analyze the long-run trends in executive compensation using a new panel dataset of top executives in large publicly-held firms from 1936 to 2005, collected from corporate reports. This historic perspective reveals several surprising new facts that conflict with inferences based only on data...

We argue that the root cause behind the recent corporate scandals associated with CEO pay is the technology bubble of the latter half of the 1990s. Far from rejecting the optimal incentive contracting theory of executive compensation, the recent evidence on executive pay can be reconciled with...

We analyze and explore option fragility, the notion that option incentives are fragile due to their non-linear payoff structure. Option incentives become weaker as options fall underwater, leading to pressures to reprice options or restore incentives through additional grants of equity-based...