Inside the Family Firm: The Role of Families in Succession Decisions and Performance
利用丹麦独特数据集，以离任CEO第一个孩子的性别作为工具变量，发现家族内部继任导致企业资产运营利润率下降至少4个百分点，尤其在快速增长行业、高技能劳动力行业和较大企业中影响更大。
This paper uses a unique dataset from Denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance. We focus on the decision to appoint either a family or external chief executive officer (CEO). The paper uses variation in CEO succession decisions that result from the gender of a departing CEO's firstborn child. This is a plausible instrumental variable (IV), as male first-child firms are more likely to pass on control to a family CEO than are female first-child firms, but the gender of the first child is unlikely to affect firms' outcomes. We find that family successions have a large negative causal impact on firm performance: operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around CEO transitions. Our IV estimates are significantly larger than those obtained using ordinary least squares. Furthermore, we show that family-CEO underperformance is particularly large in fast-growing industries, industries with highly skilled labor force, and relatively large firms. Overall, our empirical results demonstrate that professional, nonfamily CEOs provide extremely valuable services to the organizations they head.