The often long-lasting process of intrafamily business succession involves contracts for management and ownership transfer that unfold in a complex series of stages. The older and larger a family business, the more heterogeneous the involved family members' interactions and interests can become....

Financial performance is an important indicator in a company in measuring the level of viability of the company. This study aims to analyze the effect of CEO power (proxied by CEO ownership), and characteristics (CEO educational background and work experience) on firm performance as proxied by...

Determining what factors influence firm performance constitutes an essential issue in both the management and the family firm research fields. This article, building on the resource-based view perspective, develops a mediation model that involves a unique intervening mechanism, namely,...

Using a large administrative dataset for Germany, this paper compares employment developments in exiting and surviving establishments. For both West and East Germany we find a clear “shadow of death” effect reflecting lingering illness: establishments shrink dramatically already several...

Using a 50 percent sample of all establishments in the German private sector, we report that spinoffs are larger and initially employ more skilled and more experienced workers than other startups. Controlling for these and other differences, we find that spinoffs are less likely to exit than...

Shareholder activism on sustainability issues has become increasingly prevalent over the years, with the number of proposals filed doubling from 1999 to 2013. We use recent innovations in accounting standard setting to classify 2,665 shareholder proposals that address environmental and social...

I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee compensation and performance. I next create...

We develop a measurement-error framework for assessing the quality of relative-performance metrics designed to filter out the systematic component of performance, and analyze relative total shareholder return (rTSR)-the predominant metric market participants use to isolate managers'...

This study investigates the moderating influence of R&D intensity on the relationships between family management and firm performance in private firms. The results confirm that R&D intensity reinforces the negative effect of family management on firm performance. More specifically, we obtain...

We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of US companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high purpose firms come in two forms:...