Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Capital, Labor, and The Firm: A Study of German Codetermination

Contents:

Author Info

  • Gary Gorton

    (University of Pennsylvania and NBER)

  • Frank A. Schmid

    (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

Abstract

Under the German corporate governance system of codetermination, employees are legally allocated control rights over corporate assets through seats on the supervisory board-that is, the board of nonexecutive directors. The supervisory board oversees the management board-the board of executive directors-approves or rejects its decisions, and appoints its members and sets their salaries.We empirically investigate the implications of this sort of labor participation in corporate decision making. We find that companies with equal representation of employees and shareholders on the supervisory board trade at a 31% stock market discount as compared with companies where employee representatives fill only one-third of the supervisory board seats. We show that under equal representation, management board compensation provides incentives that are not conducive to furthering shareholders' interests, possibly because labor maximizes a different objective function than shareholders. We document that, under equal representation, companies have longer payrolls than their one-third representation peers have. Finally, we provide evidence that shareholders respond to the allocation of control rights to labor by linking supervisory board compensation to firm performance and by leveraging up the firm. (JEL: G32, G34) Copyright (c) 2004 by the European Economic Association.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1542-4774/issues
File Function: link to full text
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by MIT Press in its journal Journal of the European Economic Association.

Volume (Year): 2 (2004)
Issue (Month): 5 (09)
Pages: 863-905

as in new window
Handle: RePEc:tpr:jeurec:v:2:y:2004:i:5:p:863-905

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/

Order Information:
Web: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/jeea

Related research

Keywords:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

References

No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Chilosi, Alberto & Damiani, Mirella, 2007. "Stakeholders vs. shareholders in corporate governance," MPRA Paper 2334, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  2. Ginglinger, Edith & Megginson, William & Waxin, Timothée, 2011. "Employee ownership, board representation, and corporate financial policies," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 868-887, September.
  3. Fauver, Larry & Fuerst, Michael E., 2006. "Does good corporate governance include employee representation? Evidence from German corporate boards," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 82(3), pages 673-710, December.
  4. Schmid, Thomas & Ampenberger, Markus & Kaserer, Christoph & Achleitner, Ann-Kristin, 2010. "Controlling shareholders and payout policy: do founding families have a special 'taste for dividends'?," CEFS Working Paper Series 2010-01, Center for Entrepreneurial and Financial Studies (CEFS), Technische Universität München.
  5. Joachim Wagner, 2009. "One-third codetermination at company supervisory boards and firm performance in German manufacturing Industries: First direct evidence from a new type of enterprise data," Working Paper Series in Economics 136, University of Lüneburg, Institute of Economics.
  6. Jeremy Edwards & Wolfgang Eggert & Alfons Weichenrieder, 2006. "The Measurement of Firm Ownership and its Effect on Managerial Pay," CESifo Working Paper Series 1774, CESifo Group Munich.
  7. Berger, Allen N. & Kick, Thomas & Schaeck, Klaus, 2012. "Executive board composition and bank risk taking," Discussion Papers 03/2012, Deutsche Bundesbank, Research Centre.
  8. Edmans, Alex, 2011. "Does the stock market fully value intangibles? Employee satisfaction and equity prices," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(3), pages 621-640, September.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:jeurec:v:2:y:2004:i:5:p:863-905

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Karie Kirkpatrick).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.