Many companies in Germany must provide information beyond financial figures in their annual reports. For some years now, legislators have increasingly required information on non-financial aspects, such as the shares of women in leadership positions. Using a quantitative text analysis of annual...

We investigate whether outside board memberships of CEOs signal expertise or entrenchment. The analysis is based on panel data of the largest German companies covering the period from 1996 to 2008. Supporting the entrenchment hypothesis, our analysis reveals that firms having a CEO with one or...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the German corporate governance rating recently developed by Drobetz, Schillhofer, and Zimmermann (2004). We find a non- linear relationship between ownership concentration and the quality of firmlevel corporate governance as measured by the rating. Firms...