Essays in Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance and Family Firm Behavior

Essays in Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance and Family Firm Behavior PDF Author: Markus Fütterer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages : 0

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Essays in Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance and Family Firm Behavior

Essays in Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance and Family Firm Behavior PDF Author: Markus Fütterer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages : 0

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Performance and Behavior of Family Firms

Performance and Behavior of Family Firms PDF Author: Esra Memili
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3038427810
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Performance and Behavior of Family Firms" that was published in IJFS

Three Essays on Corporate Governance of Family Firms

Three Essays on Corporate Governance of Family Firms PDF Author: Tarek El Masri
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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This dissertation is comprised of three essays on issues related to the corporate governance of family firms. The first essay explores how owners-managers of family firms conceptualize and define their firms. Understanding the essence of a family firm helps us better understand their governance and behaviour. This essay contributes to the family business literature by presenting the seven most important criteria in identifying a family business (Handler 1989; Shanker & Astrachan 1996), namely: family ownership, control, involvement, succession, long-term vision, founders' legacy, and extended family of employees. The essay also contributes a familiness measurement tool that can be used in future research aiming at better understanding the family firm. The second essay investigates how management control technologies are calibrated in accordance with the sometimes conflicting economic and noneconomic goals resulting from the dual identities of family firms. The results show that family firms calibrate pervasive management control technologies, such as calculative, family-centric or procedural controls to strengthen the business identity and reduce the family identity of their family business. In comparison, the minimal use, or perceived absence, of management control technologies suggest that it accentuates and fosters family identity. Hence, reverting to management control technologies becomes related in a unilateral way to the business identity of the firm, despite the dual control ambition of family firms. The third essay analyzes CEO and TMT compensation practices to identify patterns that can explain the gap between family firms and the pool of external highly qualified executives. The data analysis highlights a connection between the degree of family ownership, the composition of the BOD, and the identity of the CEO. The results also show that family firms rely more heavily on cash-based awards than on equity-based awards as a form of CEO and TMT compensation. Family firms are reluctant to use option-based rewards and the use of share-based awards is also kept at a minimum. Other evidence point towards a role that institutional ownership plays in restructuring the compensation packages of the TMTs at family firms. Keywords: Family Firms, Definition of Family Firms, Family Firm Identity, Management Control Technologies, Corporate Governance, Executive Compensation.

Essays on Family Firm Behavior and Compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code

Essays on Family Firm Behavior and Compliance with the German Corporate Governance Code PDF Author: Christian Kohl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Essays on Financing, Investment and Corporate Governance in Family Firms

Essays on Financing, Investment and Corporate Governance in Family Firms PDF Author: Johannes Ottmar Beyenbach
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Two Essays in Corporate Finance

Two Essays in Corporate Finance PDF Author: An Chee Low
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Compensation management
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Abstract: Problems of endogeneity often cloud interpretation in corporate governance research. In this dissertation, I make use of changes in takeover laws as exogenous shocks to examine how managers react to a weakening of the corporate governance structure. In the first essay, I examine how the increased protection from hostile takeovers affects managerial incentives to change firm risk, while in the second essay I examine how firm size and firm investment behavior changes in response to the exogenous shocks. In both cases, I find that managers take actions that are beneficial to themselves but are detrimental to shareholders. Empirical evidence in the first essay show that risk-averse managers decrease firm risk in response to an exogenous increase in takeover protection in Delaware during the mid-1990s. I also find that the decrease in firm risk is concentrated among firms with low managerial equity-based incentives. Further, firms respond to the increased protection accorded by the regime shift by providing managers with greater incentives for risk-taking. Overall, the evidence supports the hypothesis that equity-based compensation can be used to align managerial interests with that of shareholders. In the second essay, I find that managers increase their firm size in response to the increased protection from hostile takeovers. The increase is predominantly among firms with low growth and high cash holdings which are exactly the firms where the agency costs of free cash flow are most costly to shareholders (Jensen, 1986). I also predict important differences in managerial empire-building through internal investments versus external acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s based on changes in stocks and options-based incentives. Consistent with my predictions, managers prefer to empire-build through internal investments during the 1980s, while in 1990s they choose to grow more through external acquisitions.

Essays in Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance

Essays in Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance PDF Author: David De Angelis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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My dissertation contains three essays in corporate finance and corporate governance. The first essay studies the effect of information frictions across corporate hierarchies on internal capital allocation decisions, using the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) as a quasi-natural experiment. SOX requires firms to enhance their internal controls to improve the reliability of financial reporting across corporate hierarchies. I find that after SOX, the capital allocation decision in conglomerates is more sensitive to performance as reported by the business segments. The effects are most pronounced when conglomerates are prone to information problems within the organization and least pronounced when they still suffer from internal control weaknesses after SOX. Moreover, conglomerates' productivity and market value relative to stand-alone firms increase after SOX. These results support the argument that inefficiencies in the capital allocation process are partly due to information frictions. My findings also shed light on some unintended effects of SOX on large and complex firms. The second essay is co-authored with Yaniv Grinstein and investigates how firms tie CEO compensation to performance. We take advantage of new compensation disclosure requirements issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2006. Firms vary in their choice of performance measures and horizons, and in their reliance on pre-specified goals. Consistent with optimal contracting theories, we find that firms choose performance measures that are more informative of CEO actions, and rely less on pre-specified goals when it is more costly to contract on CEO actions. The third essay investigates the design of division managers (DMs) incentive contracts again taking advantage of the disclosure requirements. I find that firms do not use relative performance evaluation across divisions and that in general most of DM compensation incentives are associated with firm performance instead of division performance. Furthermore, division performance-based incentives tend to be smaller in complex firms, when within-organization conflicts are potentially more severe. I also find that when the probability of promotion to CEO is lower, DM ownership requirements are more stringent and DM compensation incentives are greater. These results support notions that influence costs as well as promotion-based incentives are important considerations in designing DMs contracts.

ESSAYS ON CORPORATE FINANCE AND GOVERNANCE

ESSAYS ON CORPORATE FINANCE AND GOVERNANCE PDF Author: Serkan Akguc
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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The analysis of key corporate decisions is mostly restricted to publicly listed firms even though privately held firms constitute a substantial part of any economy. In this dissertation, my goal is to enhance our understanding of some of the important decisions of private firms, namely: cash holdings, investment and performance using unique and large cross-country samples. In the first chapter, I examine cash holdings of private, unlisted firms versus publicly traded firms in 33 European countries during 2002-2011. I find that the average cash-to-assets ratios are lower in the Eurozone than in non-Eurozone countries by 5.4% due to lower transaction demand under a single currency regime. Public firms have higher cash ratios than private firms. However, the difference in cash ratios between public and private firms is higher in the Eurozone than in non-Eurozone countries, reflecting that: (a) precautionary demand is higher in the Eurozone due to risks and pitfalls of policy coordination, and (b) economic adjustments and transfers in the Eurozone more directly affect publicly traded firms than private ones. Moreover, I show that, during the financial crisis, corporate cash ratios increased in the Eurozone, indicating that the increase in precautionary cash demand was greater than a decrease in transaction demand due to the adoption of the Euro. In the second chapter, I compare the operating performance and efficiency of publicly and privately held firms in the UK over the period 2003-2012. I find that privately held firms typically perform better than publicly traded firms. This finding is robust in various model settings, using industry and size as well as propensity scored matched samples, considering alternative definitions of operating performance, ownership structure and taking into account the endogeneity of firm's exchange listing choice. I also show that average operating profitability of public firms is even lower than that of private firms when both types of firms are financially constrained. Finally, I show that informational value of R&D is higher for private firms than it is for public firms. In the third chapter, I examine the relationship between time horizons and corporate investment, both on the firm and country levels, for private, unlisted firms and publicly traded firms using a unique dataset from 73 countries around the world during the time period of 2003-2012. I show that a longer time horizon (i.e. higher propensity to save and invest) on a cultural and country level also manifests itself as higher investment at the firm level. This is robust to using alternative proxies for the country-level time horizon. Investment behavior of private firms, not public firms, follows a country-level horizon pattern, which is reflective of close monitoring by fewer owners and the absence of stock market pressures in making investment decisions. When I consider time-horizon at the firm-level, we find that firms with a longer time horizon invest more, and this effect is more pronounced for public firms than for private firms, given the former's greater, easier, and cheaper access to capital in the public capital market. I also show that public firms invest more and are more responsive to investment opportunities than private firms.

Three Essays in Corporate Finance

Three Essays in Corporate Finance PDF Author: Jérôme Philippe Alain Taillard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Abstract: In my dissertation, I first contribute to the capital structure literature by estimating the potential impact of financial distress on a firm's real business operations. Secondly, I contribute to the ownership structure literature, and more broadly to the field of corporate governance, by revisiting the relationship between managerial ownership and firm performance. In my first essay, I analyze a comprehensive sample of defendant firms that found themselves exposed to an unexpected wave of asbestos litigation in the wake of two U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Since these legal liabilities are unrelated to current operations, firms that are in financial distress due to their legal woes provide a natural experiment to study the impact of financial distress on a firm's operational performance. When analyzing firms suffering from this exogenous shock to their finances, I find little evidence of negative spillover effects ("indirect" costs) of financial distress. That is, the competitive position of the distressed firms is not adversely impacted by their weakened financial situation. Furthermore, I find empirical support for a significant disciplinary effect of financial distress as these firms actively restructure and refocus on core operations. In my second and third essays, I focus on the relationship between managerial ownership and firm performance using a large panel dataset of U.S. firms over the period 1988-2004. In the second essay, I reconcile some of the extant literature by showing that the relationship is sensitive to the firm size characteristics of the sample being used. In particular, I recover the classic hump-shaped relationship when focusing only on the largest firms (e.g. Fortune 500 firms), while the relationship turns negative when the sample is comprised of smaller firms. The negative relationship among smaller firms is consistent with entrenchment arguments given that managerial ownership is on average much higher for small firms. Second, I find that for lower levels of managerial ownership, the negative relationship is driven by older firms that have on average less liquid stocks. This finding is consistent with firms that do not perform well enough to create a liquid market for their stock, and hence have to keep high levels of insider ownership in order to avoid a negative price impact that would result from a reduction of their stake. Lastly, these results could also be suggestive of endogeneity concerns. I investigate this issue further in my third essay. Principal-agent models predict that managerial ownership and firm performance are endogenously determined by exogenous changes in a firm's contracting environment. Changes in the contracting environment are, however, only partially observed, and the standard statistical techniques used to address endogeneity may be ineffective in this corporate setting. In my third essay, together with my coauthor Phil Davies, we develop a novel econometric approach to control for the influence of time-varying unobserved variables related to a firm's contracting environment. Using the same large panel dataset of U.S. firms over the period 1988-2004, we find no evidence of a systematic relation between managerial ownership and performance.

When Business is in the Blood

When Business is in the Blood PDF Author: Saim Kashmiri
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Family firms play a significant role in the U.S. economy, making up about 35 percent of S & P 500 or Fortune 500 companies and contributing about 65 percent to the U.S. GDP. This research explores differences in strategic behavior and firm performance between family firms and non-family firms, and further explores whether family firms such as Dell Inc. that use their founding family's name as part of their firm name (termed family-named firms, or FN firms) behave and perform any differently versus family firms such as Gap Inc. whose firm name does not include their family's name (termed non-family-named firms, or NFN firms). The first study which is based on a multi-industry sample of 130 publicly listed U.S. family firms over a five-year period (2002-2006), reveals that compared to NFN firms, FN firms have significantly higher levels of corporate citizenship and representation of their customers' voice (i.e., presence of a chief marketing officer) in the top management team. FN firms also have a higher strategic emphasis (i.e., a greater emphasis on value appropriation relative to value creation) compared to NFN firms. Furthermore, FN firms perform better (i.e., have a higher ROA) than NFN firms, and their superior performance is partially mediated by their higher corporate citizenship levels and strategic emphasis. In the second study -- an event study of 1294 product introduction announcements of 107 publicly listed U.S. family firms from 2005-2007 -- I find that relative to NFN firms, FN firms are rewarded more by the stock market for introducing new products. Superior returns to FN firms' new product introductions are partially mediated by these firms' history of trustworthy product-related behavior: FN firms, particularly those with corporate branding, and those wherein a founding family member holds the CEO or Chairman position, are more likely to exhibit a history of avoiding such product-related controversies as product safety issues, and deceptive advertising. The third study explores differences in strategic behavior and firm performance between family firms and non-family firms in the context of 7 U.S. economic recessions between the years 1970 and 2008. Findings based on a sample of 428 U.S. publicly listed firms reveal that family firms consistently outperform non-family firms during economic recessions. This superior performance is partially driven by family firms' unique strategic behavior: during recessions, family firms maintain higher levels of advertising intensity, exhibit lower financial leverage, and get involved in fewer social and employee-related unethical actions than non-family firms. The three studies taken together have important implications for family firm, branding, CSR, firm valuation, and innovation-related theory and practice. I highlight these implications in my dissertation.