It is well documented that executives granted stock options tend to exercise early and in a few large transactions or 'blocks'. Standard risk-neutral valuation models cannot explain these patterns, and attempts to capture the exercise behavior of risk averse executives have been limited to the...

This paper presents a model of investment timing by risk averse managers facing incomplete markets and corporate control. Managers are exposed to idiosyncratic risks due to the dependence of their compensation on investment payoffs which are not spanned by other assets. We show that risk averse...