• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.85-114
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• 2010

Using the financial institutions that have adopted performance-based stock option plan, this paper examines whether performance-based executive stock options improves effectively firm value. Over the period 2002~2005, we investigate short-term and long-term effects of the performance-based stock options on stock price. The empirical results are summarized as follows. First, the announcement of plain vanilla stock options generates no significant effects on firm value. Meanwhile, the announcement of performance-based stock options results in negative and significant abnormal returns, which is contrary to the expectation. In addition, we find that there are strong, significant and negative announcement effects when banks grant performance-based stock options. Secondly, there is no significant difference between the long-term performance of the sample granting stock options and that of the benchmarks, which is similar to the findings of the previous research. Also, we fail to get any evidence that performance-based stock option awards have improved the long-term firm value.