We recently released three new ESOP-related books, two of them new editions and one entirely new title:

Don't Do That with Your ESOP! 3rd Ed.

After hearing years of stories about ESOPs that made us wince, it seemed we could save people a lot of headaches if we wrote about some of the mistakes ESOP companies make and how to avoid them. Don't Do That with Your ESOP! is the result. Rather than just another long checklist, however, this book is a series of stories. The company name is usually disguised, but the scenarios and solutions are real. We engaged leading ESOP experts from all fields to help us with this task and added quite a few stories of our own. The newly released third edition makes major changes, updating some of the entries, dropping others where the mistakes are fortunately now much less common, and adding many new entries.

Executive and Director Compensation in ESOP Companies, 8th Ed.

Executive and Director Compensation in ESOP Companies, 8th ed., is a guide to the legal, financial, fiduciary, and tax issues involved with various compensation strategies at ESOP companies and also provides best-practice guidelines for setting pay. Chapter 8 discusses survey data on directory compensation, while the final chapter provides a detailed report on our 2022 survey of ESOP executive compensation while also pulling in complementary information from our 2016 survey. The combined data provide a detailed picture of the forms and size of compensation being used in ESOP companies. The eighth edition includes revisions and updates to almost every chapter.

Banks as ESOP Sponsors

Approximately 9% of all ESOPs are in banks, the highest percentage for any industry subcategory. Our new book Banks as ESOP Sponsors is a guide for those interested in implementing an ESOP at a bank. It begins with how ESOPs work and then discusses banks as ESOP sponsors, explains valuation for bank ESOPs, and ends with case studies of ESOPs at three banks.