One of the cornerstones of financial statement analysis is the discounted cash flow valuation. Despite the broad use of this valuation technique, and the economic importance of employee stock options to firm values, there is little guidance on how employee stock options should be incorporated in...

Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 123 recommends that reload options be valued at the time the reload feature is activated and not at the time of the initial grant. We demonstrate that ignoring the reload feature at the time of the initial grant can substantially understate the...

This paper examines whether the risk-taking incentives induced by performance-based vesting (p-v) compensation influence bank loan contracting and credit ratings. Consistent with our risk-shifting hypothesis, we find that the p-v based compensation, as measured by the proportion of grant date...

With the introduction of the accounting standards FAS 123 and IFRS 2 for executive stock options an important change towards fair value accounting' has taken place. As companies are now forced to value their stock options at grant date for accounting purposes, the robustness of prices against...

We derive a pricing model for employee stock options (ESO) that expands on Ingersoll (2006) by including default risk and that additionally considers the effects of employee over-confidence. We find that illiquidity reduces subjective value and alters incentive effects and value sensitivities....

Employee stock options (ESOs) have become an integral component of compensation in the U.S. In view of their significant cost to firms, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has mandated expensing ESOs since 2004. The main difficulty of ESO valuation lies in the uncertain timing of...

We investigate the use of a warrant-pricing approach to incorporate employee stock options (ESOs) into equity valuation and to account for the dilutive effect of ESOs in the valuation of option grants for financial reporting purposes. Our valuation approach accounts for the jointly determined...

One of the arguments often used against expensing employee stock options is that calculating their fair value at the time they are granted is very difficult. This article presents an approach to calculating the value of employee stock options that is practical, easy to implement, and...

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has recently endorsed a proposal that will require firms to calculate and recognize as a cost of compensation the value of employee stock options at the time those options are granted. Conventional models such as the Black and Scholes or binomial models,...

We study the problem of hedging early exercise (American) options with respect to exponential utility within a general incomplete market model. This leads us to construct a duality formula involving relative entropy minimization and optimal stopping. We further consider claims with multiple...