Implementation of EU initiatives on gender diversity and executive directors' pay in municipally-owned enterprises in Germany and The Netherlands.

A popular topic in the assessment of the functioning of municipally-owned enterprises is the corporate governance (CG) of such organizations. The results of the comparative study presented in this paper indicate that European Union initiatives on gender diversity and executive directors' pay are often not implemented in public CG codes and in practice in municipally-owned enterprises in Germany and The Netherlands. The paper proposes that EU initiatives should specifically target municipally-owned enterprises and shows concrete hard and soft regulation options for national and international policy-makers and future research perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]