The article applies the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)'s proposal to a random sample of firms that granted stock options in order to assess the impact of the related compensation expense on operating income in the United States. Under existing generally accepted accounting principles, no compensation expense is recorded for executive stock options (ESOs) if the exercise price on the date of grant is equal to the market price of the stock. Similarly, only negligible compensation expense tends to be recorded if the exercise price on the date of grant is less than the market price of the stock. The inadequacy of this method has led the FASB to consider a proposal to measure compensation related to grants of ESOs at their fair values, with a lower bound constraint. It would seem natural to use the continuous-dividend version of the B-S model for firms that pay cash dividends and the no-dividend version for firms that do not pay dividends. The latest FASB proposal requires that stock option compensation be measured as of the vesting date, as opposed to the date of grant.

The article presents a comment on the interpretation of API. In "Interpreting the API," Ronald M. Marshall concludes that API does not always provide a proper measure of either the private value of accounting data or the association between unexpected accounting signals and unexpected market returns. In addition, Marshall concludes that an alternative formulation of API always produces measures of these attributes, which are at least as good as those obtained via API. On the basis of these conclusions, Marshall argues that API constitutes the more appropriate tool for use in accounting research. Authors do not disagree with Marshall's conclusions from a conceptual viewpoint, but they do question the desirability of using API in accounting research because of its inherent subjectivity and costliness in terms of time. Since API does not possess these defects, authors believe that it constitutes the better research technique when, conceptually speaking, it can be expected to yield results, which are equivalent to those that would be produced using API. One objective of the paper is to identify an important sufficient condition, under which the two API will produce equivalent results.