Do Family Firms Invest More than Nonfamily Firms in Employee-Friendly Policies?
利用州级遗产税变化作为外生冲击，发现家族企业比非家族企业更善待员工，尤其在创始人任CEO或家族成员任董事时，且这种投资有助于缓解劳资冲突、维护家族声誉。
We examine whether family firms invest more in employee relations than nonfamily firms. Using the variation in state-level changes in inheritance, gift, and estate taxes as an exogenous shock to family control, we find that family firms, particularly those in which a founder serves as chief executive officer or those in which a family member serves as a director on the board, treat their employees better than nonfamily firms. More importantly, family firms focus on investing in employee relations that help alleviate labor-related conflicts and controversies, possibly to avoid a negative family reputation among stakeholders. Family firms’ better treatment of their employees is also evident when we use a difference-in-difference test to exploit changes in family firm status due to (sudden) deaths of family members and firms’ inclusion in Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list to identify employee-friendly treatment. We further find that family firms in the early stage of their life cycle invest more in employee relations when they operate in labor-intensive industries in which the benefits from family owners’ monitoring of employees are expected to be large. Moreover, we find that although nonfamily firms’ investment in employee relations is impeded by several constraints, such as short-term investor pressure, managerial myopia, and managerial agency problems, family firms do not suffer from such constraints. These findings help explain why underinvestment in employee relations is prevalent in public firms despite potential long-term benefits from such intangible investment. This paper was accepted by Neng Wang, finance.