Summary
This report compares the performance of corporations that offer their employees broad-based stock option plans to those that do not offer their employees broad-based stock option plans. Broad-based stock option plans are important to study because of their possible role in aligning worker and shareholder interests, encouraging job creation in knowledge-related industries, helping corporations cope with tight labor markets, and involving more citizens in sharing the fruits of capitalism. Nevertheless, little is actually known about their objective performance beyond the case histories of specific companies. The results of this study suggest that there is no systematic evidence publicly-traded corporations with broad-based stock option plans had worse performance than the larger group of publicly-traded corporations that did not adopt the plans or industry group pairs regarding productivity, total shareholder return, Tobin’s q, or return on assets.