The practice of adopting adults, even if one has biological children, makes Japanese family firms unusually competitive …. Our nearly population-wide panel of postwar listed nonfinancial firms shows inherited family firms more important in … outperform non-family firms. Using family structure variables as instruments, we find adopted heirs "causing" elevated …

, we constructed a unique data set of family trees and business groups for nearly 100 of the largest business families in … Thailand. We find a strong positive association between family size and family involvement in the ownership and control of the … family business. The sons of the founders play a central role in both ownership and board membership, especially when the …

Family firms depend on a succession of capable heirs to stay afloat. If talent and IQ are inherited, this problem is … mitigated. If, however, progeny talent and IQ display mean reversion (or worse), family firms are eventually doomed. This is the … essence of the critique of family firms in Burkart, Panunzi and Shleifer (2003). Since family firms persist, solutions to this …

In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail …

diversified and family controlled; but the others were tightly focused and had widely held apex firms; (3) US business groups …