Coffee (2005) explains that, during the 1990s, executive compensation abruptly shifted in the United States from a cash-based system to an equity-based system and ‘‘this shift was not accompanied by any compensating change in corporate governance to control the predictably perverse
incentives that reliance on stock options can create (p. 202).’’ Coffee (2005) illustrates the impact of this change as follows. Assume that a CEO holds options on two million shares of his company’s stock, which is trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of 30 to 1. If the CEO can cause the premature recognition of revenues that result in an increase in annual earnings by $1 per share, the CEO can cause a $30 price increase that would make him $60 million richer!