The Impact of Supervisory Board Characteristics on Firm Performance

Corporate boards play an important role in shaping, steering, supervising and advising an organization. Thus it is likely that corporate boards have an impact on corporate performance. There is empirical literature which analyses the interrelation between board features and company performance. The results suggest that board characteristics have a measureable impact on the economic success of a firm. Although the two-tier system prevalent in “Continental European” countries significantly differs from the one-tier regime as it separates management and supervision of an organization, there is little research done by now to examine, whether results from one-tier regimes persist in this alternative setting. Our study explores the interrelations between supervisory board characteristics and accounting as well as market based corporate performance by using a sample of German listed companies. We find that the average remuneration of supervisory board members seems to have a positive association with firm performance. Additionally and in contrast to previous results in different governance settings we find that board size does not negatively buy positively affect firm performance in terms of accounting based figures.