This study investigates whether investors incorporate the value of a firm's outstanding employee stock options into its stock price. I estimate the outstanding options' value for a sample of firms for which outstanding fixed options exceed 5% of outstanding common shares in 1988. I find a negative correlation between the value of outstanding options and a firm's share price. The correlation is stronger (i) for the option's intrinsic value than for the option's time value, (ii) for options that are later in their vesting stage than earlier in their vesting stage, and (iii) for large firms than for small firms. In addition, the FASB's method for calculating compensation expense has no explanatory power in the presence of this paper's calculation of the options' value.

Recognition, Disclosures, Oil and Gas industry, Mandatory disclosure

We investigate whether CEOs manage the timing of their voluntary disclosures around stock option awards. We conjecture that CEOs manage investors’ expectations around award dates by delaying good news and rushing forward bad news. For a sample of 2,039 CEO option awards by 572 firms with fixed award schedules, we document changes in share prices and analyst earnings forecasts around option awards that are consistent with our conjecture. We also provide more direct evidence based on management earnings forecasts issued prior to award dates. Our findings suggest that CEOs make opportunistic voluntary disclosure decisions that maximize their stock option compensation.

The Value Relevance of Intangibles: The Case of Software Capitalization Author(s): David Aboody and Baruch Lev Source: Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 36, Studies on Enhancing the Financial Reporting Model (1998), pp. 161-191 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of Accounting Research Center, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2491312 Accessed: 14/09/2010 16:12

We investigate firms’ choices between the purchase and pooling methods in stock-for-stock acquisitions. We find that in acquisitions with large step-ups to targets’ net assets, CEOs with earnings-based compensation are more likely to choose pooling and avoid the earnings ‘penalty’ associated with purchases. We find no association between stock-based compensation and the purchase–pooling choice, suggesting that managers are not concerned about implications of large step-ups for firms’ equity values. We also find that the likelihood of purchase increases with debt contracting costs, consistent with its favorable balance sheet effects, and with costs of qualifying for pooling, particularly the restriction of share repurchases.

We examine effects of government actions and related accounting policies on the corporate bond market implied by changes in relations between aggregate bond returns and cash flow and discount rate news. We capture the influence of risk by partitioning bonds into investment and speculative grades. We use earnings changes as a proxy for cash flow news and T-Bill rate changes as a proxy for discount rate news. As expected, during non-crisis periods, we observe a positive relation between earnings changes and bond returns and a negative relation for T-Bill rate changes. A combination of government bailouts of large financial institutions and mark-to-market accounting preserves the positive relation for earnings changes during the crisis for investment grade bonds, while absence of these factors leads to an insignificant relation for speculative grade. Intervention by the Federal Reserve to induce lower interest rates as earnings were declining, a flight to safety shifting demand from corporate bonds to T-Bills, and low cost funds invested in risk free investments explain a reversal of the relation between bond returns and T-Bill rate changes for both grades.

ABSTRACT Previous research argues that earnings quality, measured as the unsigned abnormal accruals, proxies for information asymmetries that affect cost of capital. We examine this argument directly in two stages. In the first stage, we estimate firms' exposure to an earnings quality factor in the context of a Fama‐French three‐factor model augmented by the return on a factor‐mimicking portfolio that is long in low earnings quality firms and short in high earnings quality firms. In the second stage, we examine whether the earnings quality factor is priced and whether insider trading is more profitable for firms with higher exposure to that factor. Generally speaking, we find evidence consistent with pricing of the earnings quality factor and insiders trading more profitably in firms with higher exposure to that factor.

An interesting question in assessing value relevance of accounting variables is whether measures of value relevance are materially affected by market inefficiencies. We explore this question in two steps: First, we analytically examine the impact of market inefficiencies on the estimation of coefficients in value relevance regressions and derive a procedure that corrects potential biases caused by such inefficiencies. The procedure adjusts contemporaneous stock prices for future risk adjusted price changes, and yields value relevance coefficient estimates that capture both contemporaneous and delayed market reactions. Second, we apply this procedure to three types of studies that have attracted much attention in the accounting literature: 1) the value relevance of earnings and book values; 2) the value relevance of residual income value estimates; and 3) the value relevance of accruals and cash flows. We compare coefficient estimates obtained from conventional value relevance regressions with those from regressions employing our adjustment procedure, and find statistically significant differences in both level and return regression coefficient estimates. The magnitude of differences in coefficient estimates for return regressions is large enough to affect economic inferences. We find that coefficients of lagged price deflated residual income value estimates move significantly closer toward a predicted value of one implying a meaningful reduction of bias. Last, we find that cash flows now have significantly larger coefficient estimates than accruals consistent with their greater persistence.

We investigate firms’ operating performance subsequent to the repricing of executive and non-executive employee stock options. We find that, relative to non-repricers, repricing firms have a larger increase in operating income and cash flows in subsequent periods. This performance improvement is attributable to the underlying economic determinants of the decision to restore the options’ incentive properties. However, only repricings of executive stock options are associated with improvement in performance; we find no such evidence for non-executive employees. Our findings suggest employee stock options provide sufficiently large incentive effects to favorably affect firms’ performance, but primarily so at the executive level.