Measuring corporate governance in Germany: An integrated framework on compliance and transparency & disclosure

Compliance as well as transparency and voluntary corporate disclosure are essential within the concept of 'good' corporate governance. Consequently, there is an increasing demand for methods enabling investors to compare companies by means of country-specific criteria. However, measures in Germany do not provide a broad spectrum of criteria for evaluating corporate compliance and governance transparency & disclosure. Our framework covers all rules of the German Corporate Governance Code as well as additional criteria, enabling investors to analyse how companies are managed. Furthermore,we raise quality criteria of social sciences to confirm our findings.