Ownership, governance and financial performance in small and medium-sized family firms.

Abstract

Using a cross sectional sample of 2,865 family firms from the 1998 NSSBF database, we examine the relationship between family ownership and financial performance for small and medium-sized family firms with a chained-interaction model in which we combine ownership dispersion proxies with several moderating governance and management variables. Our results suggest that ownership dispersion has a positive influence on performance when the family firm is in the “cousin consortium” generational stage, giving support to predictions put forth by agency cost models in private family firms (Schulze et al., 2003). Our results also suggest that the zero agency-cost base case as described by Jensen and Meckling (1976) is in fact no zero agency cost case due to ignored agency costs in family firms.