The Impact of Founding-Family Ownership on Labor Relations : Evidence from French Workplace-Level Data.

We investigate the influence of founding-family ownership on labor relations using workplace-level data from France. Based on data from labor conflicts during 2004 in workplaces of listed companies, we find that family ownership significantly reduces the duration and the percentage of employees involved in major conflicts as well as the likelihood that a workplace experiences a strike. These results are robust to different definitions of founding-family ownership and control for endogeneity. We also show that there is a significant reduction in the number of protected employee layoffs, sanctioned employees, individual law disputes handled by an employment tribunal, and the annual number of works council or union delegate meetings when a family member serves as the CEO of the firm. We document the impact of employee ownership and representation on corporate boards of directors on labor relations and find a significant and negative relationship for dependent variables. Overall, these findings suggest that ownership structure is an important determinant of labor relations within firms.