Macroeconomic Factors Forming Family Business Heir's Career Choice Intention

Abstract

While recent research on family business succession has focused on examining the importance of individual and family characteristics, the role of macroeconomic conditions has been often neglected. This paper investigates the impacts of macroeconomic conditions on family business heir's career choice intention using individual level cross-country data of 18 European countries for the year 2013. We find that the level of economic development measured by GDP per capita, growth of GDP per capita, and youth rate of unemployment influence a family business heir's career choice intention. We also demonstrate that beyond the cross-country differences in macroeconomic conditions, individual characteristics of siblings, age, gender, work experience in family business, and start-up time play an important role. To mitigate succession failures, policies towards business succession with related firm survival should be specifically designed depending on different macroeconomic and youth labour market conditions.