Coinciding with the option explosion, a large academic literature has emerged (See Murphy, 1999, for a summary) that examines the way in which executive compensation, and stock options in particular, has affected the agency relationship. The evidence suggests that the low pay-to- performance relationship estimated by Jensen and Murphy (1991) has been dramatically strengthened by the stock option explosion since executives now generally have very large holdings of company stock and stock options in their portfolios (Hall and Liebman, 1998). Moreover, the resulting pay-to-performance relationship seems to be in accord with the most basic predictions of agency theory (Aggarwal and Samwick, 1999). In.
