The small core of the German corporate board network

Abstract

Milakovic, Alfarano and Lux (2010) have identified a small core of directors who are both highly central to the entire network of German corporate boards as well as closely connected among themselves. While their analysis has been based on data for the management and supervisory boards of a sample of 287 publicly traded companies with high market capitalization as of May 2008, a subsequent study by Milakovic, Raddant and Birg (2010) using somewhat smaller samples from the years 1993, 1999, and 2005 has confirmed that this closely connected core is a persistent stylized fact for the German corporate sector. In this note, we provide an update of our previous results using the composition of management and supervisory boards as of December, 2010. Again, almost all qualitative properties of previous samples are confirmed despite considerable turnover within the group of persons constituting the network core.