After the Stock Options Boom: Changes in Equity-Based Pay Following the Mandatory Adoption of IFRS 2
研究了强制采用国际财务报告准则第2号（IFRS 2）如何影响公司对高管薪酬工具的选择，发现多数公司转向业绩股而非限制性股票，且三种理论（最优契约、管理层寻租、感知成本）均可解释薪酬设计变化。
This paper investigates the economic consequences of the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standard 2 (hereafter, “IFRS 2”) on firms’ choices between alternative executive compensation instruments. With a unique, hand-collected dataset that contains design elements of stock option plans, we find that the adoption of IFRS 2 affects both the decision to keep or to give up stock options and the choice of alternative equity compensation instruments. In contrast to recent evidence from the United States, we find that the majority of firms replacing stock options by other equity instruments switched to performance shares, not to restricted stock. Our dataset allows us to relate firms’ reactions to IFRS 2 to the three major rationales explaining stock option compensation practice, namely, optimal contracting, managerial rent extraction, and perceived cost. Our results suggest that all three rationales contribute to explaining changes in compensation design because firms with sophisticated option plans tend to keep their options, whereas design decisions by firms abandoning options are related to a lack of shareholder power.