Investors and academics increasingly criticize that features of employee stock option (ESO) programs reflect rent-extraction by managers (managerial power view). The authors use a unique European dataset to investigate the relationship between the design of ESO programs and corporate governance...

This paper determines which individual variables actually driveexercise patterns and how employees value their stock options.

This paper tries to answer the following questions: How do employees exercise their stock options? How do employees dispose of company stock acquired in stock option programs? What rational and behavioral factors explain differences in observed exercise behavior?

We use unique and proprietary data to investigate the design of executive stock option (ESO) contracts of large European firms. We document a large heterogeneity in the ESO plan design. We then construct a score of the CEO friendliness of the plan design and study the relationship between this...

We use unique data to empirically analyse the behavior of senior managers in a distinct stock option plan. Combining individual-level exercise data with very detailed questionnaire data, we study how these managers exercise their stock options. Moreover, we investigate which rational and...

What determines how top managers value their executive stock options? We explore this question empirically by using a unique survey data set which combines subjective option valuation data with a wide set of individual-level variables. In contrast to theoretical predictions, individuals in our...