This article reviews family firm studies in the finance and accounting literature, primarily those conducted using data from the United States and China. Family owners have unique features such as concentrated ownership, long investment horizon, and reputation concerns. Given the distinguishing...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

We suggest a full consolidation approach that takes into account the property rights structure whithin the subsidiaries, in particular, the majority requirements on restructurings. Our approach employs a property rights index based on cooperative game theory.

We use a unique dataset of 233 privatized firms from 38 countries between 1985 and 2008 to investigate the relation between shareholder identity and earnings quality. We find strong and robust evidence that (residual) state ownership is associated with lower earnings quality. More specifically,...

We investigate the impact of founding family ownership on accounting conservatism. Family ownership is characterized by large, under-diversified equity stake and long investment horizon. These features give family owners both the incentives and the ability to implement conservative financial...

Family control is a common phenomenon among listed corporations in the Indonesian capital market. In family-controlled firms, the so-called “Agency Problem II” may arise due to differences of interests between the controlling shareholder and minority shareholders. Firms may choose certain...