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...

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Holding the cost of the option grant to the firm...

Traditional stock option grant is the most common form of incentive pay in executive compensation. Applying a principal-agent analysis, we find this common practice suboptimal and firms are better off linking incentive pay to average stock prices. Among other benefits, averaging reduces...

This study examines the ex-post consequences of CEO compensation for shareholder value. The main objective is to explore whether companies that pay their CEO excessive fees (in comparison to those of peer firms in the same industry and size group) generate superior future returns and better...

This paper studies the first day return of 227 carve-outs during 1996-2013. I find that the first day return of newly issued subsidiary stocks is explained by the reporting distortions in the pre IPO period, conditioned on whether the executives and directors of the subsidiary received stock...

This paper asked the question of whether the behavior and compensation of interlocked executives and non-independent board of directors are consistent with the hypothesis of governance problem or whether this problem is mitigated by implicit and market incentives. It then analyzes the role of...

We study the impact of accelerated vesting of equity awards on takeovers, whereby the restricted stock and/or stock options of the target CEO immediately vest and become unrestricted upon the close of the acquisition. We find that takeover premiums are significantly larger when the target CEO...

Using a large sample of U.S. acquiring and non-acquiring firms and covering a broad sample of transactions, we examine the effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on CEO compensation during 1993-2006, a period of intense M&A activity. We alleviate endogeneity concerns through dynamic panel...

This study tests whether bank mergers are associated with valuation gains and examines how equity overvaluation and management compensation incentives influence any valuation effects. Our evidence shows that bidders are overvalued relative to their targets, especially in equity offer deals. We...

This paper examines management's motives for rejecting takeover bids and the associated shareholder wealth effects. We develop several measures of initial bid quality and find a significant negative correlation between contested offers and bid quality. The likelihood of higher follow-on offers...