Graduation Year

2016

Date of Submission

11-2015

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics-Accounting

Reader 1

Lisa Muelbroek

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2016 Ahmed H Eltamami

Abstract

Exorbitant executive compensation packages have drawn large criticism from the public eye and with the recent financial crisis and the previous tech bubble opinion on executive incentives has forced government institutions to respond. Over the past two decades the SEC and FASB have aimed to respond to the public and with three large regulation changes in the 2000s, pay for performance compensation has gone through many changes. In this study I build on previous work in an attempt to answer whether or not executives within the Information Technology industry have seen a larger decline in option compensation when compared to executives outside of the industry. Previous studies have indicated that option use has been consistently higher in the IT industry and in addition another study has showed that option use across all companies has decreased dramatically due to regulation changes. In this study I find that option use has dramatically decreased over the past decade due to regulation and that option use in the IT industry has remained consistently higher than others. I find that there is little significant evidence suggesting regulation changes have affected the IT industry at a larger rate than others. I would argue that the industry is less sensitive to regulation changes regarding option use but I do find significant evidence that the industry has seen larger decreases in option use in 2013 when compared to other industries.

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