TL;DR: In this paper, the authors document three current trends in the compensation of non-executive directors in Germany and argue that the level of pay for nonexecutive board members is still too low in Germany.
Abstract: We document three current trends in the compensation of non-executive directors in Germany First, firms increasingly use performance-insensitive variable pay components, like committee and attendance fees Second, this comes at the expense of performance-oriented variable pay components, which often are eliminated altogether Third, the performance-insensitive pay components increase in levels While we appreciate the first trend, we criticize the second one Overall, we argue that the level of pay for non-executive directors is still (too) low in Germany