Corporate Governance und Unternehmenserfolg - Eine empirische Analyse des Zusammenhangs zwischen den Führungs-, Kontroll- und Anreizstrukturen und der Geschäftsentwicklung deutscher Banken

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the international banking system attracted much attention by researchers and regulators. Since poor bank governance is seen as a major cause of the recent crisis, a deeper understanding is needed how banks are governed and how bank governance is associated with performance and risk taking. This report deals with two important yet less extensively examined aspects of corporate governance in banks: executive team expertise and non-executive compensation schemes. Both aspects are analyzed in two separate empirical studies, respectively. The analyses are based on two unique data sets: a hand-collected data set on the biographical background of board members and confidential payroll data for non-executive bank employees provided by an international consulting company. The results indicate that both aspects of corporate governance matter. Higher executive team expertise is associated with superior bank outcomes regarding performance, risk and efficiency. Compensation analyses show strong variation in compensation schemes between banks and bank divisions. Moreover, the results indicate that strong incentives in capital market divisions induced excessively high risks in the capital market segments in the run up to the crisis, while this nexus cannot be observed for more moderate bonus schemes in the crisis period.