Executive Stock Option Programs (SOPs) have become the dominant compensation instrument for top-management in recent years. The incentive effects of an SOP both with respect to corporate investment and financing decisions critically depend on the design of the SOP. A specific problem in...

This study experimentally investigates whether shareholders correctly anticipate the incentive effects of increasingly complex compensation packages given to managers, and whether potential biases in individual shareholder beliefs carry over to price and volume effects in a stock market. In the...

The dramatic rise in CEO compensation during the 1990s and early 2000s is a longstanding puzzle. In this paper, we show that much of the rise can be explained by a tendency of firms to grant the same number of options each year. Number-rigidity implies that the grant-date value of option awards...

We examine how an increase in stock option grants affects CEO risk-taking. The overall net effect of option grants is theoretically ambiguous for risk-averse CEOs. To overcome the endogeneity of option grants, we exploit institutional features of multi- year compensation plans, which generate...

The dramatic rise in CEO compensation during the 1990s and early 2000s is a long-standing puzzle. In this paper, we show that much of the rise can be explained by a tendency of firms to grant the same number of options each year. Number-rigidity implies that the grant-date value of option awards...

In this paper we examine CEO stock option contracts using UK data for fiscal year 1997. We show how the portfolio of options varies with firm wealth; describe the structure of the contract (in terms of vesting criteria related to performance targets), and illustrate whether the option...