We investigate stock option exercise decisions by over 50,000 employees at seven corporations. Controlling for economic factors, psychological factors in*uence exer- cise. Consistent with psychological models of beliefs, employees exercise in response to stock price trends|exercise is positively...

SEC-mandated, machine-readable structured filings, or “as-filed data,” are an alternative source to Compustat for companies’ accounting data. Discrepancies between as-filed and Compustat data, potentially a result of Compustat’s standardizations, affect inferences about the existence and...

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 provide large sample evidence that past price extremes influence investors' trading decisions. Volume is strikingly higher, in both economic and statistical terms, when the stock price crosses either the upper or lower limit of its past trading range. This increase in volume is more...

We examine the stock option exercise decisions of over 50,000 employees at seven corporations to provide evidence on the distribution of price-relevant non-public information among employees. When option exercise (adjusted for other factors affecting exercise) is low, stock returns in the coming...

We investigate stock option exercise decisions by over 50,000 employees at seven corporations. Controlling for economic factors, psychological factors influence exercise. Consistent with psychological models of beliefs, employees exercise in response to stock price trends--exercise is positively...

This paper describes the exercise behavior of over 50,000 employees who hold long term options on employer stock at eight corporations. Exercise is strongly associated with recent stock price movements, the market-to-strike ratio, proximity to vesting dates, time to maturity, and volatility....

Regulation requiring insiders to publicly disclose their stock trades after the fact complicates the trading decisions of informed, rent-seeking insiders. Given this requirement, we present an insider's equilibrium trading strategy in a multiperiod rational expectations framework. Relative to...

Like Cournot competitors in product markets, financial market insiders with common private information trade more aggressively than a monopolist with the same information, and thereby dissipate expected profits. Where the same insiders repeatedly receive private information, they may tacitly...

The trading decisions of a rent-seeking corporate insider who possesses long-lived private information are complicated by the regulatory requirement that he publicly disclose his trades after the fact. Such disclosure may allow other market participants to infer the insider's information. Yet...