주식매수선택권 행사와 경영자 예측 정보와의 관계

This paper examines the relation between management’s earnings forecasts and exercise of stock option for listed firms during a sample period from 2002 to 2009. This study assess the bias of management earnings forecasts to maximize the managers’ profit when the management exercise their stock option. Prior literature (Aboody and Kasznik 2000) evaluates the weight of pessimism of analysts earnings forecasts at the time of granting of stock option to prove the management’s opportunistic behavior. That is, financial analysts disclose more conservative earnings forecasts at the time of granting of stock option to maximize managers’ profit. However, these results do not demonstrate an actually managements’ opportunistic behavior to be critical point. Thus, we focus on management earnings forecasting behavior at the time of exercise of stock option to examine the managers’ opportunistic behavior. As the results, managements tend to disclose their earnings forecasts’ information before exercising stock option. Also, we find that managements issue generally optimistic earnings forecasts before that time. Many prior work (Jensen and Meckling 1976; Larcker 1983; DeFusco et al. 1990; etc.) show that positive or negative aspects have been claimed at the same time on economic effect of stock option grants. We focus on management forecasts behavior at the time of exercising stock option. Our results suggest that firms may have negative information environment due to overly optimistic disclosure before exercising stock option, unlike the original purpose of voluntary disclosure may have reduction in agency costs between managers and shareholders.