This chapter reports main findings from a comprehensive study of how Norwegian family firms are governed and how they behave and perform as economic entities. Analyzing all firms from 2000 to 2015, we show that the family firm represents the most widespread way of organizing economic activity,...

We find that potential conflicts between majority and minority shareholders strongly influence how dividends respond to taxes. When the controlling shareholder has a smaller stake, the incentives to extract private benefits are stronger – a shareholder conflict that can be mitigated by...

Little is known about the family firm as an economic entity except for the very few family firms that are public. Our paper describes a wide range of governance and finance characteristics in the population of all private and public family firms with limited liability. We find that the family...

We examine how dividend policy is used to mitigate potential conflicts of interest between majority and minority shareholders in private Norwegian firms. The average payout is 50% higher if the majority shareholder's equity stake is 55% (high conflict potential) rather than 95% (low conflict...