Family firms and performance empirical analysis from Spain

Abstract

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of family-controlled firms on corporate performance, using financial information of 47590 family firms from 2010 to 2014. From the overall sample, approximately two-third of family firms have concentrated ownership, meanwhile, the remaining one-third have dispersed and unknown ownership. With respect to generation, 76% of the family firms were in the first generation, 21% for the second generation and approximately 3% for the third generation. The main findings are that ownership structure of family firms have a positive impact on their performance. Specifically, family firms with concentrated ownership outperformed family firms with dispersed ownership; however, family firms in the 1ª generation outperform family business in the 2ª and 3ª generation. Also, aggressive incentive policy negatively affects the performance of family business for the 1ª generation and has no impact on performance for 2ª and 3ª generational firms. Unlisted family firms have lower performance than listed family firms. Lastly, medium size family businesses outperform than small and large size family businesses.