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This aim of this paper is to check whether the incentive role of executive stock options (ESO) depends on their level.

The study is based on data from a sample of 538 American firms over 11 years (1994 to 2004). Using regression analysis, the degree of association between earnings management and the percentage stock options in total compensation for different levels of the stock options granted is determined.

The study finds that ESO decreases the earning management and represents an additional control mechanism. When considering the level of ESO, a long‐term alignment of interests is found at low levels. However, at high levels, ESO becomes an additional source of agency conflict in the short and long runs.

The results confirm the coexistence of both the contractual and the managerial power hypotheses.

This study suggests that the executive compensation strategy and particularly its stock option component should be reviewed.

This study contributes to previous research by underlining the incentive impact of the level of stock options on the role of further incentive compensation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between CEO ownership, stock option compensation, and risk taking. The authors include important CEO power variables as moderators.

The paper uses a longitudinal regression analysis. In addition, the paper includes interactional plots for further interpretation.

The results indicate that CEO ownership reduces risk taking, while there is a partial support that stock options increase risk taking. CEO tenure is a powerful moderator that decreases risk taking in both CEO ownership and CEO stock option scenarios. Board independence, counter to the hypothesis in this paper, may encourage risk taking.

The findings in this paper provide support for the inclusion of CEO power variables in CEO compensation studies. However, the study examines large publicly traded companies; thus, all findings may not be applicable to small- and medium-sized companies.

Scholars have encouraged more complex CEO compensation models and the authors have examined both main effect and interaction models.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if the structure and design of CEO compensation has any effect on firm innovation. It further investigates the effectiveness of each component of portfolio of compensation incentives in encouraging innovation.

This study uses systems of simultaneous equations to model the interdependence between compensation incentives and measures of firm innovation.

Results indicate that the pay‐performance sensitivity of the CEO portfolio of compensation incentives is positively related to investment in R&D expenditures, number of patents and citations. Options in general are more effective than stocks. However, within the options portfolio, recently awarded and unvested options are more effective than previously awarded and vested options. Restricted stock is more effective than unrestricted stock.

Measuring innovation output is difficult as innovation could take different forms, including business model innovation, which does not appear in the patent data.

Stock options encourage investment in value‐increasing innovations and should remain a significant part of managerial compensation. If the firm awards stock, it should only award restricted stock.

This study uses comprehensive measures of compensation incentives and firm innovation. It views incentives as a portfolio of stock and options and uses incentives in their entirety. It examines the effectiveness of each component of the portfolio in encouraging innovation. It measures innovation as investment into the innovation process (R&D expenditures) and the resulting success of that investment (patents and citations).

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the underlying option impacts an insider’s propensity to purchase and sell before corporate announcements, the proportion of insiders’ trading after announcements relative to before announcements, and the insider’s profitability around corporate announcements.

The authors test whether the timing information and option have impacted on the tendency of insider trade, the percentage of all shares traded by insiders in the post-announcement to pre-announcement periods and the average cumulative abnormal stock returns during the pre-announcement period.

Insiders’ propensity to trade before announcements is higher for stocks without options listed than for stocks with traded options. This result is stronger for unscheduled announcements than for scheduled ones. The proportion of insiders’ trade volume after announcements relative to before announcements in stocks that have not options listed is higher than those in stocks with traded options. The positive relationship between the insiders’ signed volume and the informational content of corporate announcements is stronger in stocks without traded options than in stocks with options listed. Insider trades prior to unscheduled announcement are more profitable than those before scheduled ones.

The paper examines whether there is a difference between the effects of optioned stock and non-optioned stock. Roll et al. (2010) use the relative trading volume of options to stock ratio (O/S) to proxy for informed options trading activity. Future research could explore the impact of O/S. Moreover, the authors examine how insiders with private information use such information to trade in their own firms. Mehta et al. (2017) argue that insiders also use private information to facilitate trading (shadow trading) in linked firms, such as supply chain partners or competitors. Therefore, future research could consider the impact of shadow trading.

Since the insider’s propensity to buy before announcements in stocks without options listed is larger than in stocks with traded options and the relationship is stronger for unscheduled announcements than for scheduled ones, the efforts of regulators should focus on monitoring insider trading in stocks without options listed prior to unscheduled announcements.

First, Lei and Wang (2014) find that the increasing pattern of insider’s propensity to trade before unscheduled announcements is larger than that before scheduled announcements. The authors document the underlying option has impacted the insider’s propensity to purchase and sell, and the relationship is stronger for unscheduled announcements than for scheduled ones. Second, related studies show insider’s trading activity has shifted from periods before corporate announcements to periods after corporate announcements to decrease litigation risk. This paper find the underlying option has influenced the proportion of insiders’ trading after announcements relative to before announcements when the illegal insider trade-related penalties increase.

With the accelerated technological advancement, innovation has become a critical factor, which affects the core competitiveness of a company. However, studies about the relationship between internal stock option mechanisms and innovation productivity remain limited. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the impact of stock options and their elements design on innovation output from an internal mechanism perspective.

Using a sample of 302 stock option incentive plans announced and implemented between 2006 and 2016, this study uses the propensity score matching and difference-in-difference model to find out whether the implementation of stock options improves the innovation outputs of enterprises.

Based on the statistical analysis, it is concluded that: stock options can stimulate corporate innovation; a stock option may drive innovation outputs through two ways, performance-based incentives and risk-taking incentives, with the latter one playing a more dominant role and the risk-taking incentives of stock options, could be optimised when the non-executives granting proportion is larger, the granting range is limited, the incentive period is longer, the exercisable proportion is increasing, the price-to-strike ratio is lower and relatively loose performance assessment criteria are applied.

The conclusion reached in the study may provide valuable information to listed firms in designing and implementing the stock option plans.

Using the next-day and next-week returns of stocks in the Korean market, we examine the association of option volume ratios – i.e. the option-to-stock (O/S) ratio, which is the total volume of put options and call options scaled by total underlying equity volume, and the put-call (P/C) ratio, which is the put volume scaled by total put and call volume – with future returns. We find that O/S ratios are positively related to future returns, but P/C ratios have no significant association with returns. We calculate individual, institutional, and foreign investors’ option ratios to determine which ratios are significantly related to future returns and find that, for all investors, higher O/S ratios predict higher future returns. The predictability of P/C depends on the investors: institutional and individual investors’ P/C ratios are not related to returns, but foreign P/C predicts negative next-day returns. For net-buying O/S ratios, institutional net-buying put-to-stock ratios consistently predict negative future returns. Institutions’ buying and selling put ratios also predict returns. In short, institutional put-to-share ratios predict future returns when we use various option ratios, but individual option ratios do not.

Starting from 2003, Microsoft and many other companies have either gradually reduced or completely replaced stock options with restricted stocks in their compensation plans. This raises an interesting question: which form of compensation is better, stock or options? This chapter makes an economic comparison between the two compensation vehicles and concludes that stock is preferred to options. The backdrop of the study is dynamic asset allocation within a utility maximization framework whereby the company may go bankrupt. The incorporation of bankruptcy risk into the analysis is motivated by the recent downfalls of companies such as Enron and WorldCom.

We demonstrate that vesting requirements and bankruptcy risk can lead to significant value discounts. When the restricted stock and options have a vesting period of 5 years, and account for 50% of the total wealth, the total discount is more than 60%, out of which 20% is due to bankruptcy risk. More importantly, we find that stock is a better compensation tool than options. For a given dollar amount of grant, the higher the stock proportion, the higher the expected utility. In fact, replacing options by stock can lead to a substantial amount of cost savings for the firm, while maintaining the same level of utility for the employee. For example, when options account for 50% of the total wealth and are subsequently replaced by stock, the granting cost is reduced by about 60%. Our findings therefore provide a theoretical support for the move to stock-only style of performance compensations.

This paper looks at the research to date on the future of broadly granted stock options (options granted to at least half the full-time employees of a company). In the U.S., granting options broadly became popular in the late 1990s, but has lost some of its appeal in the wake of stock market declines, accounting changes, and increased shareholder concerns about dilution. The data indicate a significant minority of companies will change their plans, but a substantial majority will keep them. The data also indicate changes in accounting rules will not affect stock prices and that broadly granted options are better for corporate performance than narrowly granted options.