This study examines how family firm characteristics affect capital structure decisions. In our analysis we disentangle the influence of three distinct components of a family firm: ownership, supervisory and management board activities by the founding family. Thereby, we use a unique panel...

Around the world (with the U.S. and U.K. as exceptions) concentrated ownership structures and controlling shareholders are predominant even among listed firms. We provide novel empirical evidence how such controlling shareholders, in particular founding families, affect payout policy decisions....

Objectives: We examine decision factors of family firm owners for hiring a non-family Chief Financial Officer (CFO). We explore the perceptions of family firm owners towards external managers by analyzing how their family-specific and company-specific goals relate to the employment of a...

We address the question of whether hedge fund and private equity investments in public firms are motivated by corporate governance improvements. As opposed to traditional financial investors both HF and PE are likely to have the incentives to alleviate agency conflicts. However, against the...

Recent research indicates that the majority of listed firms in Germany (and also in many other countries around the world) have a dominant owner rather than being widely-held. Hence, owner-dominated firms comprise an important subset of listed companies. This article introduces the concept of an...

In January 2010 the Deutsche Börse Group introduced two family firm stock indices. Both indices are calculated as price and performance indices and extend the number of investment strategy indices of Deutsche Börse Group. The DAXplus Family is an all-share index whereas the DAXplus Family 30...

This paper investigates the wealth effects of private equity (PE) investor purchases of shares in German quoted companies. It is the first study to analyze these effects for the German market which is particularly interesting due to its distinct characteristics with regard to the ownership...