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Family ownership is very common for Jordanian businesses, leading to a high level of involvement of family members in company management. There continues to be intense discussion on the pros and cons of family ownership, particularly as it focuses corporate control within a small family group. The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of family- and non-family-owned banks that appear on the Amman Stock Exchange over the 2016 to 2020 period.

The research on Jordanian domestic banks is based on data from the annual reports of banks listed on their websites which offers comprehensive data on finances, ownership and the board. Family-owned and non-family banks were analysed using multiple regression technique to identify any variations in their performance.

Using a sample of 16 domestic banks with 75 bank-year observations over the 2016 to 2020 period, the study supports other research in finding that family ownership is negatively related to bank performance. This is true for accounting-based and market-based performance measures, including return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Tobin's Q test results. Additionally, analysis identifies greater negative consequences for performance within family-owned banks by board of directors.

This paper extends previous research on family businesses by investigating the impact of family ownership on the financial performance in the Jordanian bank sector. This research determined that devaluation is a consequence of higher levels of ownership concentration for domestic banks in Jordan.

This study examines the potential impact of capital structure on the financial performance of family-owned firms in Jordan.

Using panel data of 107 listed companies from 2019 to 2021, the authors use a multivariate regression model to empirically examine the role that family firms' capital structure can play in engendering financial performance in the short and long terms.

This study's evidence indicates that family businesses rely on equity as their primary source of funding. This approach has been proven to be detrimental to their financial performance, as evidenced by the negative impact of capital structure on family firms' financial performance in the current study.

Capital structure-related decisions are essential to a firm's performance. Thus, there have been numerous empirical studies examining the relationship between capital structure and corporate performance in various settings worldwide. However, the findings of these studies are inconclusive. Also, there are relatively few empirical studies investigating the association between capital structure and the performance of family firms in emerging countries, particularly Jordan. This study, therefore, addresses this empirical gap in extant literature.

This study aims to examine the potential influence of multiple directorships (MDs) on the firm value of listed firms in Jordan.

Using a sample of 1,067 firm-year observations of Jordanian listed companies from 2010 to 2020, this study applies a pooled ordinary least squares regression model to examine the above-stated relationship. This technique was supported by conducting a generalized method of moments estimation to address the possible occurrence of endogeneity concerns.

The results show a significant negative relationship between MDs and firm performance, thereby supporting the “Busyness Hypothesis”, which suggests that directors with MDs are expected to be over-committed, too busy and less vigilant. Thus, their ability to effectively monitor the company management on behalf of the shareholders is quite limited.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in Jordan, and one of the very rare studies in the Middle Eastern and North African region, to examine the relationship between MDs and firm performance. This study provides important policy and practitioner implications in the field of corporate governance by highlighting the necessity of imposing stricter limits on the number of directorships allowed for board directors. Crucially, the empirical evidence implies that limited directorships ensure that directors are able to fulfil their board responsibilities appropriately, which is significantly associated with the firm value.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to fill a research gap in the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and financial performance of family and non-family firms’ by using a sample of non-financial firms listed on Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) for the period 2009–2015.

This research employs a quantitative method using data that include corporate governance mechanisms, firm characteristics and financial ratios of a sample of Jordanian listed firms in the ASE over the period 2009–2015. The sample covers all companies that have been part of the ASE during the period including both family and non-family firms, part of total of 228 companies listed on the ASE as of 31 December 2015. The study used accounting-based measures such as return on asset (ROA) and market-based measures such as Tobin’s Q as proxies for corporate financial performance.

The study found that board size both in term of Tobin’s Q and ROA has a negative relationship with the performance of family firms. In non-family firms, there is no systematic relationship with corporate performance. There is a strong relationship between corporate performance and independent directors in non-family firms. In addition, the authors found some evidence for a relationship between performance and independent directors in family firms. Also, results indicated that ownership concentration has an insignificant correlation with corporate performance and in family firms has a negative and significant correlation with Tobin’s Q. There is a significant relationship between local investors’ ownership and corporate performance as measured by Tobin’s Q in family and non-family firms.

Studies concerned with the effect of corporate governance on firm performance remains comparatively under-researched in Middle East countries and Jordan in particular (Najib, 2007; Omet, 2004; Marashdeh, 2014). Moreover, studies investigating whether the practice of corporate governance has the same impact on family firm performance are still relatively less well known than those when ownership is distributed widely (non-family firms) (Jaggi, Leung and Gul, 2009; Prencipe and Bar-Yosef, 2011). This research is seeking to fill this current gap in Jordan, which is one of the developing countries with an emerging economics that are very poorly represented in the literature.