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Report
The effect of employee stock options on bank investment choice, borrowing, and capital
In this paper, we test the hypothesis that granting employee stock options motivates CEOs of banking firms to undertake riskier projects. We also investigate whether granting employee stock options reduces the bank's incentive to borrow while inducing a buildup of regulatory capital. Using a sample of 549 bank-years for publicly traded banks from 1992 to 2002, we find some evidence that the bank's equity volatility (total as well as residual) and asset volatility increase as CEO stock option holdings increase. In addition, it appears that granting employee stock options motivates banks to ...
Journal Article
Recent revisions to corporate profits: what we know and when we knew it
Initial estimates in the National Income and Product Accounts significantly overstated U.S. corporate profits for the 1998-2000 period. Subsequent revisions reveal that the profitability of the nation's corporate sector in the late 1990s was substantially weaker than "real-time" data indicated. An unexpected surge in employee stock options exercised-and perhaps, in some sectors, firms' inflated statements of profit-may help explain the large downward revisions.
Journal Article
Options on the outs
Journal Article
Expensing stock options
Many market commentators argue that companies should expense the stock options they give their employees. Will expensing give investors better information about what companies earn and spend?
Report
ESOP fables: the impact of employee stock ownership plans on labor disputes
By the early 1990s, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) had become as prevalent in unionized firms as in nonunionized firms. However, little research has been devoted to examining the implications of ESOPs for collective bargaining or, more generally, for cross ownership. In this paper, we extend the signaling model of Cramton and Tracy (1992) to allow partial ownership by the union. We demonstrate that ESOPs create incentives for unions to become weaker bargainers. As a result, the model predicts that ESOPs will lead to a reduction in strike incidence and in the fraction of labor disputes ...
Working Paper
The forecasting performance of German stock option densities
In this paper the authors estimate risk-neutral densities (RND) for the largest euro-area stock market (the index of which is the German DAX), reporting their statistical properties, and evaluating their forecasting performance. The authors have applied an innovative test procedure to a new, rich, and accurate data set. They have two main results. First, They have recorded strong negative skewness in the densities. Second, they find evidence for a significant difference between the actual density and the risk-neutral density, leading to the conclusion that market participants were surprised ...