Managerial incentives to increase firm volatility provided by debt, stock, and options

Abstract

We measure a manager’s risk-taking incentives as the total sensitivity of the manager’s debt, stock, and option holdings to firm volatility. We compare this measure to the option vega and to relative measures used by the prior literature. Vega does not reflect the option value of equity, does not capture risk incentives from managers’ stock and debt holdings, and does not reflect the fact that employee options are warrants. The relative measures do not incorporate the sensitivity of options to volatility. The new measure explains risk choices better than vega and the relative measures. Our measure should be useful for future research on managers’ risk choices.

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