A growing literature is devoted to understand how firms react to unforeseen events. Contributing to this research, we investigate how the presence of families in corporate ownership and governance affected firm performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using data from Italy, the first western...

Prompted by the shakeup of Covid-19 on financial markets, scholars have begun to explore the corporate traits that can make firms more resilient to a pandemic. In this paper, we explore how the involvement of families in ownership and governance positions influences the financial performance of...

We study how family ownership shapes the firms' likelihood of being involved in antitrust indictments. Using data from Italy, we show that family firms are significantly less likely than other firms to commit antitrust violations. To achieve identification, we exploit a law change that made it...

We study how generalized trust shapes the ability of firms with different ownership forms to obtain trade financing and perform during a financial crisis. Exploiting geographic variations in trust across Italian regions and the occurrence of the 2008-09 financial crisis in a...