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...

We document three current trends in the compensation of non-executive directors in Germany. First, firms increasingly use performance-insensitive variable pay components, like committee and attendance fees. Second, this comes at the expense of performance-oriented variable pay components, which...

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...

Research suggests that restricted labor mobility discourages managers from investing in human capital and reduces firm value. However, whether firms re-incentivize managers to mitigate its adverse effects remains unexplored. We find that after the adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine...

We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial and disclosure related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their re-election to express displeasure over the directors'...

The study examines the Russian and Belarusian Board of Directors. The study benchmarks remuneration systems of international best practices, international industry recommendations, and internal Corporate governance code's provisions. The Russian Boards of Directors have limited control over the...

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U‐shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the...

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U-shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the...

Prior studies show uncertain associations between board independence and firm performance. We propose a novel measure of board independence and argue that influential CEO-directors (ICDs), those with higher compensation than the appointing firm's CEO, are more independent of appointing firm's...

This paper investigates the role external advice plays in the board's determination of CEO compensation. We show that CEO incentive pay increases with the degree of compensation consultant independence using a quasi-natural experiment provided by the creation of an independent consultant after...