Determinants of executive board remuneration new insights from Germany

Abstract

Board remuneration in German listed companies becomes more and more subject of public and political discussion, concerning the presumed lack of transparency and too short-term orientation. Besides the increasing regulatory activity, the arrangement of board compensation constitutes a focal economic issue of current empirical corporate governance research. The purpose of our analysis is to identify factors determining the amount and the structure of board compensation in Germany. Our study of 128 German listed companies for the business year 2011 investigates the impact of company-, performance and corporate governance-related factors on board remuneration by means of a multivariate-regression analysis. The analysis indicates that company size has a positive impact and leverage a negative on management board compensation. Furthermore, ROE and return on total capital, as indicators for performance-related variables, both have a positive impact on the average level of management remuneration. However, the corporate governance-related characteristics as ownership concentration and size of the supervisory board have no significant impact on management board remuneration.