While in the US stock-based incentives are commonly used since the 50s of the last century, in Germany they were invented only some ten years ago. Even in 1996 firms faced considerable regulatory difficulties when willing to grant such incentives. In the meantime the legal environment has...

Building on a unique panel data set of German Prime Standard companies for the period 2005-2008, this paper investigates the influencing factors of both director compensation levels and structure, i.e. the probability of performance-based compensation. Drawing on agency theory arguments and...