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...

Different economies at different times use different institutional arrangements to constrain the people entrusted with allocating capital and other resources. Comparative financial histories show these corporate governance regimes to be largely stable through time, but capable of occasional...

The remote inland province of Shanxi was late Qing dynasty China's paramount banking center. Its remoteness and China's almost complete isolation from foreign influence at the time lead historians to posit a Chinese invention of modern banking. However, Shanxi merchants ran a tea trade north...

Japan's corporate sector has, over the past century, been reorganized according to every major corporate governance model. Prior to World War II, wealth Japanese families locked in their control over large corporations by organizing them into pyramidal groups, called zaibatsu, similar to...

We observe less efficient capital allocation in countries whose banking systems are more thoroughly controlled by tycoons or families. The magnitude of this effect is similar to that of state control over banking. Unlike state control, tycoon or family control also correlates with slower...

Examine how differences in typical ownership structure in various countries can impact economic development.Governance of a country’s wealthiest corporations by a few families, permitting concentrations of high trust among the wealthy but encouraging little external trust, promotes political...

Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting “insufficient” loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty – people undergoing a...

Investigates the relationship between management ownership and market valuation of the firm, as measured by Tobin's Q. The convergence-of-interest hypothesis suggests that a firm's market valuation should rise as its management owns an increasingly large portion of the firm. On the other hand,...

We observe less efficient capital allocation in countries whose banking systems are more thoroughly controlled by tycoons or families. The magnitude of this effect is similar to that of state control over banking. Unlike state control, tycoon or family control also correlates with slower...

Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting "insufficient" loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty -- people undergoing a...