This paper determines which individual variables actually driveexercise patterns and how employees value their stock options.

This paper tries to answer the following questions: How do employees exercise their stock options? How do employees dispose of company stock acquired in stock option programs? What rational and behavioral factors explain differences in observed exercise behavior?

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">Abstract</heading>We use unique case study data to analyze the behavior of top managers in an executive stock option plan. We gather questionnaire data on the managers' traits and combine it with exercise data. Managers in our sample expect low volatilities (compared to historical estimates) and are well...

Investors and academics increasingly criticize that features of employee stock option (ESO) programs reflect rent-extraction by managers (managerial power view). We use a unique European data set to investigate the relationship between the design of ESO programs and corporate governance...

Stock option programs constitute an important economic domain both for the issuing companies and for their employees. Little is known, however, about which individual variables actually drive exercise patterns and how employees value their stock options. We study the following set of research...

Employee stock options (ESOs) are a widespread and economically highly significant phenomenon, both at the company and at the employee level. Stock options are not only relevant for CEOs, but also and increasingly for managers at lower grades in a corporation. Despite its economic importance,...