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This study aims to investigate the relationship between the presence of the family variable within a business enterprise and the managerial factors affecting the success of new product development (NPD). This can be structured into three research questions: What is the relationship between the presence of the family variable within a business enterprise and the managerial factors affecting the success of NPD activities? How the managerial factors affecting the NPD process are faced in family firms? Which are the main differences (e.g. strengths and/or weaknesses) in dealing with the managerial factors affecting the NPD process between family and non‐family firms?

The study employs a grounded‐theory and case‐study approach to investigate the relationship between the presence of the family variable within a business enterprise and the managerial factors affecting the success of NPD. The starting point is an in‐depth literature review on the managerial factors differentiating family from non‐family firms, and the managerial factors affecting NPD success. Then, a multiple case‐study on five Italian family firms and five Italian non‐family enterprises is conducted. The case‐studies lead to the development of an empirically grounded theoretical framework that outlines how the distinctive characteristics of family businesses are related to the managerial factors affecting NPD success.

Family firms clearly emerge as more long‐term oriented than non‐family enterprises. The long‐term orientation of family businesses vs non‐family companies seems to play a pivotal role in originating NPD projects with long‐term thrust. If a company is long‐term oriented it is reasonable to expect that it will put its long‐term vision in NPD programs, thus reaching a NPD long‐term thrust.

The study advances research on strategic innovation and NPD in family vs non‐family firms. It develops new theory at the important intersection of family business and innovation/NPD research, filling a gap in the literature and providing justification and guidance for the design of more comprehensive studies. Future research could investigate and test the theoretical framework on a wider empirical base, using either qualitative or quantitative methods.

The paper addresses the failure of innovation management research to recognize, embrace, and deliberately incorporate family firms. It therefore fills a gap in the literature and extends prior research by introducing specific propositions that are supported by the case data and originally integrating them in the general research stream on NPD and family‐firm characteristics. The originality of the study lies also in the fact that it appears to be the first comparative analysis on this specific topic involving both family and non‐family enterprises.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of imported intermediate inputs on innovation performance, differentiating among types of innovation output (product and process innovation) and considering both family and non-family firms in the Spanish context.

This paper uses an unbalanced panel of 1963 firms in the Spanish manufacturing sector (13,155 observations; 2006–2016) that can be identified as family or non-family firms. The authors apply a recently developed methodology (conditional mixed process model) that takes into account the possible relationships among the dependent variables to a panel bivariate probit model with robust standard errors.

Importing intermediate inputs is an important source of process innovation for all firms, but not of product innovations. Significant differences were found between family and non-family firms in favor of the family type.

This paper breaks down the family state into two categories (belonging to a family group or not) because the database does not contain information regarding the percentage of family ownership or the number of family members in the management structure. Moreover, the research is context specific.

These results will be useful for firms that are considering the value of importing intermediate inputs as a strategy to improve their process innovations, particularly for family firms.

Family firms are more successful in the utilization of imported intermediate inputs to achieve greater innovation performance. If family firms are more competent in leveraging their intermediate input imports in innovation performance, it should contribute to increasing business performance.

The research on imports takes into account the different impacts of intermediate imports depending on innovation performance (product innovation vs process innovation) and the nature of the firm (family firms vs non-family firms).

This paper brings together research on advertising, family business, and the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm to examine performance differences between publicly traded US family vs non-family firms. The purpose of this paper is to understand the heterogeneity of family vs non-family firm advertising after such firms become publicly traded.

The authors draw on the RBV of the firm, as well as on extensive empirical literature in family business and advertising research to empirically examine the differences between family and non-family firms in terms of performance.

Using panel data from over 2,000 companies across ten years, this research demonstrates that family businesses have higher advertising intensity than competitors, and achieve higher performance returns on their advertising investments, relative to non-family competitors. The results suggest that the “familiness” of public family firms is an intangible resource that, when combined with their advertising investments, affords family businesses a relative advantage compared to non-family businesses.

Family involvement in publicly traded firms may contribute toward a richer resource endowment and result in creating synergistic effects between firm “familiness” and the public status of the firm. The paper contributes toward the RBV of the firm and the advertising literature. Limitations include the lack of qualitative data to ground the findings and potential moderating effects.

Understanding how family firms’ advertising spending influences their consequent performance provides new information to family firms’ owners and management, as well as investors. The authors suggest that the “familiness” of public family firms may provide a significant advantage over their non-family-owned competitors.

The implications for society include that the family firm as an organizational form does not need to be relegated to a second-class citizen status in the business world: indeed, combining family firms’ characteristics within a publicly traded platform may provide firm performance benefits which benefit the founding family and other stakeholders.

This study contributes by highlighting the important influence of family involvement on advertising investment in the public family firm, a topic which has received limited attention. Second, it also integrates public ownership in family firms with the family involvement–advertising–firm performance relationship. As such, it uncovers a new pathway through which the family effect is leveraged to increase firm performance. Third, this study also contributes to the advertising and resource building literatures by identifying advertising as an additional resource which magnifies the impact of the bundle of resources available to the public family firm. Fourth, the use of an extensive panel data set allows for a more complex empirical investigation of the inherently dynamic relationships in the data and thus provides a contribution to the empirical stream of research in family business.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of independent directors in reducing firms’ information asymmetry. Moreover, the authors enrich this investigation by differentiating the effectiveness of independent directors in an intriguing comparative setting of family vs non-family firms. Family firms are used to represent an interesting environment where controlling insiders (i.e. firms’ founding families) have dominant control over corporate decisions. This study addresses the question of whether controlling-insiders dominate independent directors.

The authors manually collect firms’ founder information to identify family firm status in a sample of S&P 500 firms. Following a large literature in capital market research, the authors proxy information asymmetry by trading volume, bid-ask spread and price volatility. The authors employ multivariate regression with two-stage least square analysis, instrumental variable method, Heckman selection model and Hausman–Taylor model to address the issue of endogenous selection of board of director and family firm status.

The authors find a negative relation between the board independence and information asymmetry, suggesting independent directors are effective in reducing information asymmetry. Furthermore, the authors find this negative relation is stronger in family firms. These results are robust after controlling for the endogenous issues using various models.

Our results suggest that independent directors in family-controlled firms are more successful in reducing information asymmetry than their counterparts in non-family firms. The authors provide direct evidence to support the existing theoretical arguments from Rediker and Seth (1995) and Anderson and Reeb (2004) that founding families and independent boards might be a powerful combination for aligning the interest of insider and diffused shareholders. The findings ease a prevalent concern that the role of independent directors might be compromised in an environment with controlling shareholders, and advocate regulations promoting board independence for various business practices.

A number of studies concentrate on the practice of corporate disclosure of firm’s performance and governance and how corporate disclosure mitigates information asymmetry (Leuz and Verrecchia, 2000; Ali et al., 2007; Chen et al., 2008). To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the impact of independent directors in reducing information asymmetry. The research adds to understanding the incentives of board members and supports recent findings that different types of investors have heterogeneous incentives for corporate disclosure (Srinidhi et al., 2014).

The purpose of the study is to examine the zero-leverage (ZL) phenomenon in family and non-family firms.

The authors consider three hypotheses and empirically test them using a sample of the largest US firms over the 2001–2016 period.

The authors find that, on average, 19.20% of family firms have zero debt vs 10.42% for non-family firms. The authors also find that family firms strategically choose to be ZL to maintain financial flexibility for future investments and exercise control over the decision-making process, consistent with the hypotheses of financial flexibility and control considerations. However, non-family firms are more likely to have zero debt if they have financial constraints and the credit market does not lend them money at affordable credit rates, consistent with the financial constraint hypothesis.

This paper contributes to different strands of literature. First, the authors contribute to the literature examining family firms' financial decisions. Second, the authors complement previous studies by exploring the reasons for the ZL behavior of family firms compared to non-family firms. The authors also examine the previously unexplored impact of ownership concentration on the ZL question.

The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate social performance attained by listed family and non-family firms in Japan. They are measured by the composite CSP index and five attributes composed of employ relations, social contributions (SCs), firm security and product safety, internal governance and risk control, and environment concern.

The authors employ univariate and regression analyses on the quantitatively aggregated CSP score data of Japanese firms from 2007 to 2009.

Japan non-family firms tend to perform better than family firms in terms of attaining corporate social performance overall. Family CEOs positively affect CSP in the foods, textiles and apparels, and pharmaceutical industries as well as in retail trade, wholesale, and services industries, but negatively affect CSP in the heavy manufacturing industry. In these industries the joint effect of the percentage of family shareholdings and the fraction of family members on the board also augments the positive role played by family CEO. The findings are robust when the sample is ranked by Tobin’s q.

The observation period is short due to the data availability of CSP by Toyo Keizai Inc. This data covers all the listed firms which answered the questionnaire, which may also contain sample selection problems.

Positive role of CEO and negative effects of shareholdings among listed family firms in Japan call for attention and corrective measures for top management and family shareholders.

While family firms in Japan may accumulate socioemotional wealth, they should exert more efforts to advance CSP and create social capital.

This is the first comprehensive quantitative study in the field, which explored CSP of all the listed family firms vs non-family firms in Japan with large sample.

This study examines the reporting of impairment losses in family and non-family private firms. The socioemotional wealth (SEW) theory suggests that the reporting practices in family firms may differ from non-family firms and may vary among family firms.

The research question is examined using a large-scale archival study. The authors use unique register data on family relationships for Norwegian private firms provided by the CCGR database at BI Norwegian Business School.

Drawing on the socioemotional wealth theory, the authors predict and find that private family firms are more reluctant to report impairment losses compared to private non-family firms. The results also suggest that both the likelihood to report impairment losses and the impairment amounts increase with board independence in private family firms. The authors also find some evidence suggesting that private family firms with a family CEO report lower impairment losses than private family firms without a family CEO, but this result is less robust and should be interpreted with caution.

The true economic impairment is unobservable. The authors use proxies based on prior research to control for whether impairment losses are faithfully reported or not.

The results suggest a higher risk of impairment losses being managed in private family firms than in private non-family firms and that independent board members mitigate this tendency somewhat in private family firms. Awareness of this risk should have practical value for stakeholders such as non-family owners and creditors, external auditors, supervisory and monitoring bodies, and regulators.

This study contributes to the accounting literature by examining the reporting of a specific accrual (impairment losses) in the setting of private family firms. Prior research in this area is scarce.

Based on the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective and agency theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the introduction of the 2006 Corporate Governance (CG) Guidelines and family governance affected the level of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting of non-financial companies in Bangladesh.

The authors use multivariate regression to analyse 2,637 firm-level annual observations, from 1996 to 2011 annual reports of Bangladeshi publicly listed non-financial-sector companies, to investigate how firm-level CG quality affects CSR disclosure in family and non-family firms.

CG quality significantly increases the level of CSR disclosure and this relationship is stronger prior to the new CG Guidelines. Family firms’ CSR reporting levels are significantly lower than non-family firms’, and this effect is stronger after the change in the CG Guidelines. CEO duality, the presence of an audit committee and profitability improve family-firm CSR reporting in Bangladesh, while non-family CSR disclosures are positively associated with board size and firm competition. Board independence is not related to CSR disclosure.

The authors provide evidence of the benefit of the CG Guidelines’ introduction on company CSR disclosure in an emerging economy and the importance of specific governance mechanisms that differentiate family and non-family-firm CSR disclosures in Bangladesh using a SEW framework.

This paper aims to explore the impact of brand authenticity dimensions (i.e. aesthetic, symbolism, heritage, originality, quality commitment and virtue) on consumer engagement in the context of social media. This study answers to the need of scholars to understand consumer behaviour towards family and non-family firms’ brand authenticity constructs and for practitioners to find the correct levers to increase consumer engagement.

Top 10 European family firms with a retrievable Facebook (FB) page from the Global Family Business Index have been selected. Then, the study analysed family firms’ social media consumer engagement versus their non-family business direct competitors on a sample of 21.664 FB posts over a four-year period, leveraging multi-group analysis.

The results outline that three out of six brand authenticity dimensions posted on FB are statistically arousing more interactions respect to non-authenticity-related contents when posted by family firms. However, there are no statistically significant findings when brand authenticity content is posted by the non-family competitors.

This research is helpful for practitioners and entrepreneurs who might want to strengthen their social media brand strategies. With this regard, the study provides insights on which elements of brand authenticity are perceived by consumers as more engaging and which levers to use when communicating the familiness of the company.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies crosscutting the family business and brand authenticity literature streams to conduct an empirical analysis based on official FB data with a data set of over 20,000 observations. Moreover, this study assesses that not every dimension of the brand authenticity construct is relevant in the context of social media and that its effectiveness depends on the firms’ familiness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the generational differences among publicly traded family firms in regards to value creation and value appropriation in the innovation process by drawing upon the knowledge-based view (KBV) and family business literature with a focus on socioemotional wealth perspective.

The authors tests the hypotheses via longitudinal regression analyses based on 285 yearly cross-firm S & P 500 firm observations.

First, the authors found that family ownership with second or later generation’s majority exhibits lower levels of value creation capabilities compared to non-family firms, whereas there is no difference between those of the firms with family ownership with a first generation’s majority and non-family firms. Second, the authors also found that family owned firms with a first generation’s majority have higher value appropriation abilities compared to nonfamily firms, while there is no significant difference in value appropriation between the later generation family firms and non-family firms.

The study help scholars, family business members, and investors better understand family involvement, and how it impacts firm performance through value creation and value appropriation.

The paper contributes to the family business, innovation, and KBV literature in several ways. While previous family business studies drawing upon resource-based view and KBV often focus on the value creation in family governance, the authors investigate both value creation and value appropriation phases of innovation process.