Executive Stock Options and Earnings Management: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Ohad Kadan () and Jun Yang ()
Additional contact information
Ohad Kadan: Olin Business School, Washington University in Saint Louis, Campus Box 1133, One Brookings Drive, Saint Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA
Jun Yang: Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1701, USA

Quarterly Journal of Finance (QJF), 2016, vol. 06, issue 02, 1-39

Abstract: We study the effect of the grants of executive stock options (ESOs) and restricted stock on earnings management and insider trading during the vesting years of these grants. In our theoretical model, an informed manager compensated by stock options is mandated to issue an earnings report. Uninformed investors price the stock based on this report. The manager can manipulate the report to affect the stock price, but earnings management is costly to the manager. The optimal report balances the benefits from exercising stock options and the costs of earnings management. Earnings management and insider trading occur at the vesting date only if the options are in the money post manipulation, and are intensified by larger grants. The model identifies three major determinants of the extent of both earnings management and insider trading: The moneyness of the options at the vesting date, the size of the grants, and cumulative stock returns between the grant date and the vesting date. Our empirical results confirm that the moneyness of newly granted stock options and cumulative stock returns are strongly correlated with both earnings management and insider trading in vesting years. In contrast, the size of the grants is only weakly related to earnings management and insider trading in vesting years.

Keywords: Executive stock options; earnings management; insider trading (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2010139216500038
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:qjfxxx:v:06:y:2016:i:02:n:s2010139216500038

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S2010139216500038

Access Statistics for this article

Quarterly Journal of Finance (QJF) is currently edited by Fernando Zapatero

More articles in Quarterly Journal of Finance (QJF) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().