Executive compensation in Germany

Understanding executive compensation and its effects helps design better organizations. Research on this area is thus of paramount importance. For large US companies, the ExecuComp database offers access to standardized and comprehensive executive compensation data. Hence, research on executive compensation has strongly focused on US companies. It is not clear that research results based on US data apply to other countries due to differences in corporate governance and culture. We have built up a database that is similar to ExecuComp for Germany, which is by far the largest economy in Europe. This database includes companies from the two largest German stock indices DAX and MDAX. We make these data available for academic research. We describe the data and we provide important results to outline the opportunities that our database offers. We find that only some of the empirical results for US companies such as the association between company size and pay level generalize to German companies while others such as compensation structure and the vertical pay inequality provide opportunities for further investigation. © 2020, The Author(s).