This publication from the Financial Markets Center offers a closer look at the rise of stock options. The report "summarizes the key trends in the use of stock options and highlights the broader implications of this practice for measuring earnings and conducting national economic policy." Five points are discussed in this nine-page document, allowing readers to understand the basic principles and...

Understanding Stock Options by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) provides a good non-technical introduction to options. It explains the benefits of options, differences between options and stocks, the pricing of options, and it provides some basic options strategies. Fischer Black and Myron Scholes first published their formula for valuing an option in 1973. Robert Merton independently...

David Backus, Professor of Economics and Finance at Stern Business School, New York University, has provided the course materials for his MBA course on debt instruments on the web. The syllabus, lecture notes (160 pages), reviews, assignments and exams are all available in PostScript format. The site also contains a few working papers and a manuscript "Quantitative Models of Bond Pricing" that is...

This special report from the Financial Markets Center (FMC) includes an extensive collection of articles that look at the phenomena of margin loans in the United States. As the stock market continues to rise, stockholders are using their stocks as collateral to borrow money in order to purchase more stock, causing margin debt. Along with a large section of staff member-authored explanatory briefs...

Recently, in Red Herring, Charles Conn, CEO of Ticketmaster Online-City-Search explained the difficulties of hiring people in San Francisco: "Everyone seems to know someone whose company just got bought for millions of dollars," and according to Conn, job seekers in the Internet industry put stock options high on their list of benefits and incentives. This week's In The News examines stock options...

The Education Center for Optionetics.com offers basic information on stock options. The collection of articles and guides is broken into four sections. Basic Options Concepts presents the main workings of stock options, including how to use options and how to exit an options position. Advanced Options Concepts contains articles on more obscure concepts such as long-term risk and volatility. Option...

This 191-page document from the Census Bureau includes the tables "Rates of Return, All Manufacturing Corporations," "Composition of the Sample, by Division and Asset Size," and "Profits per Dollar Sales, by Division and Major Group."

Salary.com offers an invaluable range of information about salaries and benefits. The site showcases its Salary Wizard, which allows users to see whether their salaries meet the average in their area, as well as what kinds of salaries they would make in other parts of the country. The data is complimented with a large collection of related salary surveys; Salary.com has written detailed...