I know we’ve been hammering mega-grants of stock options at low, low prices – because, really, it is just cheating – but substituting time-restricted stock is not an option (if you’ll forgive the pun).
However, that’s what seems to have been happening.
A new report out today shows that profits from stock options have gone from around 12 percent of total realized compensation in 2006 to zip in 2008, at the median.
We’ve even got a pretty graph to prove it.
What this chart also shows is that even though cash bonuses fell as a proportion of total realized compensation, they didn’t do so by very much. So much for the reactivity of short-term incentives to the worst recession since, well, the last worst recession.
Paul Hodgson - Senior Research Associate
