Family Business Review

Empirically, the confluence of family involvement, ethics, and performance is a sparse research area. The authors explore a rich theoretical framework relating family involvement, ethical focus, and firm performance and empirically test a mediated model using a sample of 526 family businesses. The results illustrated that a firm’s ethical focus mediated the relation between family involvement and financial performance. Specifically, data supported the relation between family involvement and a firm’s ethical focus. And increased ethical focus predicted increased financial performance. The authors discuss the implications of these findings and offer potential areas for future research in family business studies.

This article investigates the effects of separation of ownership and control because of vote differentiation on listed family firms’ investment performance. The authors study the question of whether family-controlled firms have better investment performance than nonfamily firms and whether this investment performance is negatively affected by a separation of ownership and control because of vote differentiation. Marginal q is used as a performance measure. The empirical analysis shows that family control has a positive impact on investment performance when ownership and control are aligned, whereas separation of ownership and control in terms of vote-differentiated shares reduce investment performance.

This article sheds light on the valuation of family firms when compared with nonfamily firms as acquisition targets. The authors argue that although the majority of theoretical and empirical research explicitly recognizes the prevalence and superior performance of family firms around the world, acquiring companies tend to regard family firms as unprofessional and inefficient organizations, thus negatively affecting their valuation when compared with nonfamily firm targets. Overall, the authors’ empirical analysis, based on a matched-pairs methodology and use of multiples, shows that acquiring companies favor the stagnation perspective rather than the stewardship perspective and thus pay less (i.e., acquire at a discount) for a family firm target than for a nonfamily firm target.

The authors examine the role played by a voluntary professional association as a carrier of mimetic and normative institutional pressures in the institutionalization of new governance practices among family businesses. They observe how a change in guiding values within family businesses is led by an institutional champion actively involved in the professional association. This institutional champion bridges the gap between micro-level change at the firm level and the professional association’s macro-level discourse. This study makes several contributions to both family business research and institutional theory.