Accounting for Stock Options
回顾了股票期权费用化的历史，批评了FASB新准则的缺陷，并提出了更简单、不易操纵的Bulow-Shoven替代估值方法。
As public companies begin their new fiscal years, they are implementing a new and controversial Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB, 2004) proposal for expensing stock options. Applied to 2003 and 2004, this rule would have slashed reported earnings of the Standard & Poor's 500 by 8.6 and 7.4 percent; the effect in the bubble years would have been more than twice as large. We describe the history of how these options have been expensed for financial statement purposes. We assess the new FASB approach and find that it is deeply flawed. The main purpose of the paper is to describe an alternative options expense valuation method, the Bulow-Shoven approach, that addresses these problems. Our approach is simpler than the new FASB methodology, less prone to earnings manipulation and more consistent with the way the rest of compensation is treated in financial statements.