If you look at the Chairman of the Board, you can also observe big differences across countries. The small countries have more non-domestic chairmen of the board than the large ones. The UK stands out again among the large countries. We see that 20% of the UK companies in our sample have a chairman of the board who is not from the UK. By contrast not a single German or Italian company has a non-domestic chairman of the board. Among the small countries, the NL is an interesting case. None of the Dutch companies in our sample is headed by a non-Dutch chairman.

By definition, all the companies in our sample of 101 FT-500 firms are large. There are, however, significant size differences among these companies. The smallest company in our sample has a market capitalisation of about $2 billion, while the largest has a market capitalisation of around $160 billion.