According to conventional wisdom, family ownership, which signals a lack of social capital and trust in an economy, may impede innovation. This argument, however, fails to recognize that modern family firms can benefit from capitalist institutions that promote innovation. Using a comprehensive...

We look at the corporate performance of family firms listed on the French stock exchange between 1994 and 2000. On the French stock market, approximately one third of the firms are widely held, another third are founder controlled and the remaining third are heir-controlled family firms. We find...

Dynastic management is the inter-generational transmission of control over assets that is typical of family-owned firms. It is pervasive around the world, but especially in developing countries. We argue that dynastic management is a potential source of inefficiency: if the heir to the family...

We study the relationship between liquid asset holding and the pattern of share ownership and control structures within the firm. We explore these issues using a data set of Belgian firms that is particularly well suited to studying the institutions of control oriented finance. The data include...

Using firm-, industry-, and country-level data, we document a link between family ownership and labour relations. Across countries, we find that family ownership is relatively more prevalent in countries in which labour relations are difficult, consistent with firm-level evidence suggesting that...

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. These measures of managerial practice are strongly associated with firm-level productivity, profitability, Tobin’s Q, sales growth and survival...

We provide evidence on the match between firms, managers and incentives using a new survey designed for this purpose. The survey contains information on a sample of executives' risk preferences and human capital, on the explicit and implicit incentives they face and on the firms they work for....

This paper examines whether the export decision of firms is affected by their ownership structure, specifically it looks at whether family control is an obstacle to entering foreign markets. The underlying assumption is that family firms are risk averse. Risk aversion may be an obstacle to...

Entrepreneurs may be constrained by the law to bequeath a minimal stake to non-controlling heirs. The size of this stake can reduce investment in family firms, by reducing the future income they can pledge to external financiers. Using a purpose-built indicator of the permissiveness of...

In this paper, we study the performance of Italian listed family firms in the period 1998-2003. We measure their performance by using both accounting and market data. We first study the relative performance of family firms compared to widely held firms. Then we investigate whether performance is...