This paper investigates how banks and finance companies operate in a family business group. Using uniquely detailed ownership data from Thailand, we find that the controlling families extensively use pyramids to control banks and finance companies and assign different lending strategies across...

The allocation of credit by banks on quot;softquot; terms to friends and relatives - often termed cronyism - rather than on the basis of quot;hardquot; market criteria in the years leading up to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 has been hypothesized as an important cause of the crisis....

This paper examines the ownership structure of listed Thai firms. The data sample is based on 1996. As expected, the ownership structure is extremely concentrated. In 82.59 percent of the firms in the sample, the largest shareholders own at least 25 percent of the shares. According to Thai...

This paper shows that marriage can function in a similar way as mergers and acquisitions. To set up alliances that would benefit the firms, a controlling family would encourage their children to marry a person from a politically or economically powerful family. To test this hypothesis, we...

Since 2010, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) has purchased stocks to boost domestic firms' valuations to increase GDP growth. The stock return elasticity with respect to BOJ purchases relative to the previous month's market capitalization is around 1.6 on the day of the purchase and decreases across...

Family firms depend on a succession of capable heirs to stay afloat. If talent and IQ are inherited, this problem is mitigated. If, however, progeny talent and IQ display mean reversion (or worse), family firms are eventually doomed. This is the essence of the critique of family firms in...