It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a "representative" Swiss executive and extend the certainty- equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002) to...

We investigate the impact of independent valuation specialists on the downward bias of pre-initial public offering employee stock option valuations. Undervalued stock price estimates underlying firms' option grants produce option valuations that overstate earnings and provide employees with deep...

We derive a simple formula for the cost of the ESO to the firm at the grant date under the assumption that the executive has a constant market-to-strike multiple. The market-to-strike multiple is defined as the ratio of the market price on exercise to the strike price of the ESO. The expected...

This paper develops a new pricing model for American-style indexed executive stock options. We rely on a basic model framework and an indexation scheme first proposed by Johnson and Tian (2000a) in their analysis of European-style indexed options. Our derivation of the valuation formula...

More than half of S&P 500 CEOs receive options annually, however extant valuation models have not accounted for portfolio considerations. We show the inability of executives to diversify means portfolio effects matter: exercise thresholds and shareholder costs are lower than for stand-alone...

Employee stock options (ESOs) are American-style call options that can be terminated early due to employment shock. This paper studies an ESO valuation framework that accounts for job termination risk and jumps in the company stock price. Under general Levy stock price dynamics, we show that a...

We propose a new framework to value employee stock options (ESOs) that captures multiple exercises of different quantities over time. We also model the ESO holder's job termination risk and incorporate its impact on the payoffs of both vested and unvested ESOs. Numerical methods based on Fourier...

In this paper, I have used simple arbitrage argument to derive a dozen of model-free option price properties. In addition to deriving the Greeks under the model-free framework, the results show that first, in contrast to the traditional view, a European call (put) option for a...

When investing in derivatives portfolios (such as options), the delta-gamma approximation (DGA) is often used as a risk management strategy to reduce the risk associated with the underlying asset price. However, this approximation is accepted only for small changes of the underlying asset price....

This paper provides a simple way to obtain an option-implied asset volatility surface. The proposed estimation technique allows to estimate the unobservable asset volatility surface in the same fashion of what is done when equity volatility is extracted from options. Given a sample of 66 US...