H istory is replete with examples of spectacular ascents of family businesses. The Rothschilds, for example, not only amassed the greatest concentration of private wealth the Western world has ever seen, they are also credited with changing the fate of history by financing monarchs and kings—one of their most famous bets being the support for Wellington’s armies, which ultimately led to the def...

We investigate the impact of founding family ownership structure on the agency cost of debt. We find that founding family ownership is common in large, publicly traded firms and is related, both statistically and economically, to a lower cost of debt financing. Our results are consistent with the idea that founding family firms have incentive structures that result in fewer agency conflicts bet...

Recently many researches have studied technological innovation capabilities (TICs) and their impacts on firm’s competitive performance in the field of manufacturing industries. This paper pursued Yam et al. (2004) framework to study the relevance of TICs and firm's competitive performance in a mainly-service-based industry in Iran (ICT). Empirical data were collected through a questionnaire from...

This study examines the moderation effects of corporate governance provisions on the link between family involvement (i.e., family ownership and family management) in publicly-traded firms and firm performance by drawing upon agency theory, with a focus on principal-principal agency issues, and the extant family governance literature. We develop and test the hypotheses on 386 of the S&P 500 fir...

the concept of countervailing power is a term to describe the situation in which the market power of one side (sellers) may be balanced by the market power of another side(buyers) in a given market. the purpose of this paper is to test this hypothesis and to determine whether the market power of sellers has had a restraining influence on increases in buyer market power in iran’s large industrie...

recently many researches have studied technological innovation capabilities (tics) and their impacts on firm’s competitive performance in the field of manufacturing industries. this paper pursued yam et al. (2004) framework to study the relevance of tics and firm's competitive performance in a mainly-service-based industry in iran (ict). empirical data were collected through a questionnaire...

The theory of firm growth is in a rather unsatisfactory state. However, the analysis of large firm-level datasets which have become available in recent years allows us to begin building an evidence base which can, in turn, be used to underpin the development of more satisfactory theory. Here we study the 239 thousand UK private sector firms born in 1998 over their first 15 years of life. A firs...