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...

This paper studies the impact of external reference values on managerial compensation contracts. We consider the effect of adoption of non-binding pay nfirms on actal remuneration behavior using a unique country example. We find that introduction of pay nfirms changed the reference values for...

We study changes in the design of CEO contracts when firms transition from being public with dispersed ownership to being private with strong principals in the form of private equity sponsors. These principals redesign many, but far from all, contract features. There is no evidence that they...

We analyze a hand-collected dataset of 1669 executive compensation packages at 34 firms included in the main German stock market index (DAX) for the years 2006- 2014 in order to investigate the impact of the 2009 say on pay legislation. First, we observe that the compensation packages of...

Remuneration consultants are an integral part of the process of determining executive pay in large listed companies. This paper discusses the role of the consultants in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, analyses their industry and the factors currently affecting it, and summarizes...

In this Article we submit that the compensation structures at banks before the financial crisis were not necessarily flawed and that recent reforms in this area largely reflect already existing best practices. In Part I we review recent empirical studies on corporate governance and executive pay...

The results of this paper add significant contributions to the earlier findings that investigated various incentives to CEO's, contingent on future returns. This paper chooses a long time horizon, and revisits the challenges of aligning CEO Compensation with Performance and Shareholders' best...

Executive remuneration is often criticised as being excessive and not clearly linked to firm performance. This study further examines the link between pay and performance by examining the impact of promotion-based tournament incentives. Our hypotheses draw on tournament theory of labour...

Using a large sample of U.S. acquiring and non-acquiring firms and covering a broad sample of transactions, we examine the effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) on CEO compensation during 1993-2006, a period of intense M&A activity. We alleviate endogeneity concerns through dynamic panel...

We hand collect a database that includes a direct measure of the incoming CEO's in-house experience at the time of succession. In contrast to previous studies that rely on an insider-outsider binary variable, our continuous variable allows us to examine compensation incentives following CEO...