Publicly traded family businesses in Europe do business with a longer-term perspective and more successfully than companies that are not family businesses – and the greater the influence of the founding family, the better their performance. This is the conclusion reached by the study of an...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...