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The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of non-founder CEO succession on firms’ research and development (R&D) decision, and further explore its mechanism and economic consequences.

Using founders’ personal-level information of entrepreneurial firms in the Chinese growth enterprise market from 2009 to 2015, the authors empirically investigate whether firms can be motivated to launch more R&D activities as the result of switching to non-founder CEOs. The author’s further test the impact of non-founder CEOs on R&D output to distinguish their motivation. Moreover, the authors use stepwise regression to explore the mechanism and possible channels.

The authors find that R&D investment significantly increases in firms with non-founder CEOs and the R&D output that comes in the form of patent exhibits an upward trending in numbers, too, ruling out non-founder CEOs’ incentive to chase private benefits. Specifically, the authors find that non-founder CEOs can promote R&D investment through their more professional human capital and better internal control. The authors also show mitigating effects under different circumstances on the relationship between non-founder CEOs and R&D investment.

This study helps the authors to understand the impact of non-founder CEO succession on R&D investment in emerging markets. It also indicates that human capital of non-founder CEOs is critical in driving firms’ innovation, proposing policy suggestions to improve formal intermediary labor market of professional CEOs.

This study provides elaborate theoretical analysis and empirical tests on the mechanism and economic consequences of (non-)founders’ impact on R&D activities.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between founder-chief executive officers (CEOs) and firm performance. Specifically, the paper explores two opposing arguments on the performance implications of founder-CEO leadership. The first theoretical perspective argues that founder-CEOs positively contribute to firm performance since they bring passion, vision, and external legitimacy to the organization. The contrary resource-based perspective, argues that while founder-CEOs help in the early years of the firm, they become less effective as the firm evolves into a complex bureaucracy since they lack the necessary managerial skills.

In order to test these perspectives, the paper develops a matched sample of 82 US manufacturing firms and compared their performance using both accounting and market-based measures. Independent sample t-tests and analysis of variance were used to empirically test the opposing predictions. Data were obtained from the Mergent Online database as well as official proxy filings of sample firms.

The results of the data analysis indicate that there is a statistically significant performance difference between founder-led and non-founder led firms. Such performance difference is especially evident when the paper focusses on accounting-based firm performance measures such as return on assets and return on investment. Surprisingly, founder-led firms performed worse than those led by non-founder CEOs. The follow-up analysis indicates a significant difference in age and size among sample firms led by founders and non-founders such that founder-led firms tend to be younger and smaller in size.

Unlike other studies in the literature that found a strong positive impact of founder-CEOs, the findings of the study provided empirical support for the resource-based explanation of founder-CEO impact on firm performance. Specifically, the findings reported here contribute to understanding the role of founder-CEOs in the context of executive succession, strategy selection as well as organizational evolution.

This study makes original contribution to the on-going research on strategic leadership by exploring the performance effect of founder-CEOs and the corresponding alternative theoretical explanations. In addition, the inclusion of both accounting and market-based (Tobin's Q) dependent variables provide a broader measure of firm financial performance.

This study aims to examine the impact of controversial governance practices on media coverage under a specific context. Based on the attribution theory, this study develops a theoretical framework to explore how antecedent factors can influence attribution process under a particular cultural context.

This paper presents a behavioral view of the media and corporate governance to demonstrate how media attributes different reasons for the same controversial governance practice in Chinese-specific context. Using 1,198 non-state-owned listed company observations in China as the study sample, cross-section data are used to build a multiple linear regression mode to test hypotheses.

The analysis indicates that the media imposes fewer penalties on founder-CEO firms than on non-founder-CEO firms for engaging in controversial governance practices, such as CEO compensation. CEO tenure negatively moderates the effect of CEO compensation on negative media coverage in non-founder-CEO firms. The positive media bias evidence for founder-CEO firms exists only when the firm is better performed.

This study’s contribution to the governance literature starts with its logical reasoning of basic assumptions in the agency theory, and that media penalty will arise when managers impose actions that against interests of shareholders or other stakeholders. This study shows that the rule is not always true. The findings also bridge the connection of governance literature and reputation literature to better explain how media can act as a social arbitration role.

This study provides insights into how belief and information of reputational evaluators affect attribution consequences on controversial governance practices. Moreover, this study looks beyond the internal elements and focuses on China’s traditional cultural context as well. Specifically, the authors concentrate on the attribution process by showing the importance of evaluators’ framing tendency with regard to controversial practices. The results extend the knowledge about how conformity makes media coverage shows a bias effect on interactions during the evaluation process.

The purpose of this paper is to extend governance research in the small business context by examining the moderating influence of top executive involvement on the board of directors on market valuation.

Drawing on a sample of initial public offering (IPO) high-tech firms engaged in late-stage funding, the study uses stepwise regression to test board involvement moderation effects.

Primary market investors reward governance structures that limit founder power.

The current study introduces the notion that optimal market valuation depends not only on whether a CEO-founder governs the firm, but also on level of involvement on the board of directors.

The purpose of the research is to study how Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO’s) ownership, CEO’s structural and expertise power and underwriters’ reputation affect the initial public offering (IPO) lockup period.

The study uses the multivariate regression method to test the hypothesis on a sample of 1,071 US IPOs, which comprise 80 per cent of the total population of IPOs over the 1998-2002 period.

It was found that CEO equity ownership had a direct positive impact and two indicators of CEO positional power (CEO duality, founder status) and underwriter reputation had a direct negative impact on the length of the lockup period that results from IPO negotiations between the issuing firm and the underwriter. It was also found that underwriter reputation negatively moderates the impact of equity ownership (likely due to a substitution effect) and positively moderates the impact of CEO duality on lockup period length (by offsetting the impact of CEO positional power).

Previous studies have exclusively studied the affect of economic factors on IPO lockup. This paper extends the extant literature by studying the insider’s characteristics like CEO’s power and underwriter’s reputation on IPO lockup periods.

The purpose of this paper s to study the financing behavior of family firms (FF), as these differ from their small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) counterparts in their capital structure decision, mainly due to an increased risk aversion and the desire to maintain control over the firm.

A sample of 470 SMEs from a bank-based environment is examined for the period of 2005-2010. A dynamic panel data model is utilized to assess both the role of several capital structure determinants and the target-adjusting behavior for different subsamples of firms.

The results show that FF, whether controlled by founders or not, are relatively more leveraged. The aim to maintain long-term control and limited financing options and other factors seem crucial to the observed differences in leverage and dominate risk considerations associated with higher debt. Presumed differences in agency costs across generations do not drive capital structure decisions, as overall leverage does not differ between founder- and descendant-controlled family firms (FCFF and DCFF, respectively). Firms with a founder-chief executive officer (CEO), however, adjust faster to deviations from a target debt ratio. The effects of many proposed capital structure determinants differ across firm types, but are highly consistent with predictions from the pecking order theory.

Based on the results of this study, we suggest policy-makers in bank-based economies like Austria to strongly focus on mechanisms that facilitate the access to bank debt to ensure adequate allocation of finances to SMEs. This is especially important to stimulate growth and further innovation for the dominant group of FF, as they rely on debt the most to maintain family control.

This paper makes a novel contribution to the literature, as it combines an analysis of the capital structure of non-listed family firms (NFF) in a bank-based economy, the respective role of founder management, the dynamic adjustment to a presumed debt target and joint tests of capital structure theories.

Notwithstanding the relevance of managerial control systems (MCS) in any organization, as well the distinctive role they can play in family business, due to its specific features, the literature rarely dealt with the role and characteristics of MCS in family business. Taking into account previous contributions from different disciplines (organization, management accounting, and family business), the current work aims to better understand the state of the art about research in the field of MCS in family business in order to identify main research gaps and propose future research directions.

Forty-five articles have been analyzed, which were issued in 29 sources. Research findings show that the literature on MCS in family business is limited and not very conclusive. Some authors focused on the type of controls, other authors outlined the role of MCS in managerialization and the relation with professionalization. A few studies focused on some specific mechanisms, especially strategic planning and compensation. Some contributes dealt with MCS’ determinants and impacts. Differences between family and non-family firms were proposed. However, a clear and organized picture of the features of MCS in family firms, their determinants, and impacts has not yet been developed. Particularly, the impact of the distinctive features of family business on MCS represents an underdeveloped research field along with how MCS can be differently developed and used in different kinds of family firms. In the light of findings of the literature review, we propose a reference research framework on MCS in family business.

While the branding of individuals has attracted increasing attention from practitioners in recent decades, understanding of personal branding still remains limited, especially with regard to the branding of celebrity CEOs. To contribute to this debate, this paper aims to explore the co-branding of celebrity CEOs and corporate brands, integrating endorsement theory and the concept of meaning transfer at a level of brand attributes.

A between-subjects true experimental design was chosen for each of the two empirical studies with a total of 268 participants, using mock newspaper articles about a succession scenario at the CEO level of different companies. The study is designed to analyse the meaning transfer from celebrity CEO to corporate brand and vice versa using 16 personality attributes.

This study gives empirical support for meaning transfer effects at the brand attribute level in both the celebrity-CEO-to-corporate-brand and corporate-brand-to-celebrity-CEO direction, which confirms the applicability of the concept of brand endorsement to celebrity CEOs and the mutuality in co-branding models. Furthermore, a more detailed and expansive perspective on the definition of endorsement is provided as well as managerial guidance for building celebrity CEOs and corporate brands in consideration of meaning transfer effects.

This study is one of only few analysing the phenomenon of meaning transfer between brands that focus on non-evaluative associations (i.e. personality attributes). It is unique in its scope, insofar as the partnering relationship between celebrity CEOs and corporate brands have not been analysed empirically from this perspective yet. It bridges the gap between application in practice and the academic foundations, and it contributes to a broader understanding and definition of celebrity endorsement.

This study aims to investigate the role of firm age in the relationship between CEO characteristics (measured by founder status and civic engagement) and the level of corporate philanthropy which is one of the important components of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices (Carroll, 1991).

Drawing from upper echelons theory, this study argues that firm age functions as a barrier that limits the relationship between CEO characteristics and the level of corporate philanthropy. Moderated regression analysis (MRA) was used to analyze data from 146 publicly traded US firms between 2010 and 2017.

This study verified that there is a significantly positive relationship between CEO civic engagement and the level of corporate philanthropy although the relationship between CEO founder status and the level of corporate philanthropy was not found to be significant. Specifically, the relationship between CEO characteristics and the level of corporate philanthropy was weaker as firms get older. Overall, the results indicate that the organizational inertia of older firms can restrict the effect of CEO characteristics on corporate philanthropy.

This study provides new insight into the underlying mechanisms between CEOs and firm age. This study also suggests that CEOs interpret corporate philanthropy as an important part of their civic engagement which broadly supports business legitimacy for their firm.

This study provides lessons for executive selection and succession decisions toward CSR strategies. Specifically, this study provides a practical foundation of how executives’ civic engagement can be related to corporate philanthropy as an important dimension of CSR practices. Furthermore, this study suggests that shareholders pay more attention to the ultimate decision-maker, the CEO, in an organization as his or her background characteristics can reflect a firm’s social responsibility initiatives, including corporate philanthropy.

This study contributes to on-going scholarly work in the field of strategic leadership and corporate philanthropy literature. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence to the nature of scholarly conversations regarding the role of firm age in shaping the relationship between CEO characteristics and corporate philanthropy.

This paper aims to explore the effects of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on firm survival and examine whether founder chief executive officers (CEOs) are more effective than other types of managers at utilizing entrepreneurial orientation at initial public offerings (IPOs).

Using survival analysis the authors investigate the effects of EO on firm survival as well as the moderating role of founder CEOs.

The results suggest that EO increases post‐IPO survival. Further, founder‐CEOs moderate the EO‐survival relationship.

The paper shows that entrepreneurial orientation enhances long‐term survival in IPO firms. Survival is an important, though generally overlooked consideration in EO research. The paper also concludes that firms with founder CEOs are more likely to value and implement EO. Finally, the paper addresses calls for greater use of secondary measures of EO.