All other forms of pay show up as a compensation expense and reduce profits immediately.

That was clear, they said, from how much the firm's compensation expenses shrunk.

That implies a total of $3.8 billion was missing from their combined compensation expense.

When a company gives something of value to its employees in return for their services, it is clearly a compensation expense.

Such options were the only ones that could be ignored by companies in calculating compensation expenses.

Stock-based compensation expense was roughly $188 million, or 3 cents a share, the company said.

Ten thousand shares at, say, a market price of $50 becomes a simple addition of $500,000 to the compensation expense.

In 1990, Merrill cut compensation expenses by about $30 million.

Companies cut their compensation expenses by 11 percent.

As a result of those and earlier reductions, the firm's compensation expenses fell 19 percent from a year ago, to $2.2 billion.