Essays on empirical corporate finance and corporate governance

In three self-contained essays, this dissertation deals with the impact of board structure on firm performance and with determinants of executive compensation, director compensation, and payout policy. Each of the three chapters is based on panel data sets of German firms. Distinguishing features of the institutional environment of German firms lead to new and interesting insights compared to the evidence for the US market. Chapter 2 explores the impact of former CEOs on the supervisory board on firm value, operating performance and executive as well as director compensation. The strict institutional separation of managers with leadership/advisory and managers with monitoring tasks within the two-tiered board system also enables the investigation of their absolute and relative importance in explaining firm performance in Chapter 3. Using different Lintner-type partial adjustment models competing theories regarding the choice of dividends and stock repurchases as payout methods are tested in Chapter 4.