The aim of this work is to investigate the drivers of productivity evolution in the European life insurance industry in the aftermath of the enforcement of the Third Directive. We apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to a panel of 602 life insurance companies operating in five European...

We study the reluctance of family firms to accept private equity (PE) investors and the impact of PE on family firm's performance. We analyze the productivity growth in a sample of 257 PE-backed family firms, 143 of which were run by the founding generation. We compare these firms with both...

We use the lens of the resource-based view and horizontal agency cost theory to analyse the effect of the presence of different types of individual owners, i.e., owner-managers and non-manager individual shareholders, on the performance of high-tech entrepreneurial firms. Ownership enlargement...

We aim to ascertain to what extent the better performance of European venture capital (VC)-backed firms in high-tech industries is due to either ‘screening’ or ‘value added’ provided by VC investors. We compare portfolio firms’ productivity growth before and after the first VC round,...