Concluding Remarks

This study makes two contributions. First, we assemble a unique database — the German Corporations Database (GCD) — that provides a solid basis for corporate governance analysis in Germany (Chapter 3). Compared with previously available data sets, GCD is less likely to suffer from selectivity bias because it includes listed and non-listed corporations, private as well as public. In addition, GCD allows to avoid common methodological drawbacks of previous studies such as endogeneity or missing variables because it is a large unbalanced panel and because it contains a much richer set of information on all relevant corporate governance mechanisms.