My dissertation consists of two chapters exploring several aspects of empirical corporate finance with a special focus on founder CEOs and family firms. Chapter 1 focuses on the impact of founder CEO leadership on firm value in publicly listed U.S. firms. Previous research on how founder CEOs affect firm value shows mixed results. Using a natural experiment whereby I measure the impact of the sudden deaths of CEOs during the period 1964–2018, I document that stock prices increase by 1.56% upon founder CEOs’ deaths and decrease by 2.89% upon professional CEOs’ deaths. Next, I develop a novel measure of managerial private benefits and discuss several new insights. First, I document that the positive stock price reactions to the sudden deaths of founder CEOs are mainly driven by the fact that founder CEOs extract two times greater private benefits relative to professional CEOs. Second, segregating private benefits into two parts – nepotism and non-nepotism – I find that investors react to both types of private benefits. Third, investor reactions are more pronounced for tunneling-related disclosed private benefits than for investment-related non-disclosed private benefits. Fourth, investors reactions are more pronounced for private benefits related to underinvestment than for private benefits related to overinvestment. Overall, my paper highlights the impact of CEO leadership styles on shareholder wealth. Chapter 2 examines significant family ownership in publicly listed U.S. firms. Instead of holding a diversified portfolio, family owners, such as the Waltons of Walmart, hold large fractions of their wealth in a single stock. To explain this decision, we build a unique model of ambiguity aversion wherein the family’s information advantage in their firm allows them to more accurately estimate value-at-risk in tail events relative to the diversified portfolio. Using an index of macroeconomic uncertainty, we find a strong, negative relation between the uncertainty beta and both family ownership and involvement. Also consistent with our predictions, we document that families with high absolute wealth or risk aversion are unlikely to exit the firm. Our analysis provides an explanation for a family owner’s decision to hold a concentrated stake in a single firm in countries with well-developed financial markets and legal regimes. / Business Administration/Finance

A large number of firms around the world are family firms. Many of these family firms are involved in internationalization strategies. Despite the breadth of knowledge on the internationalization of large family firms, not enough attention has been paid to some of the aspects of internationalization. Specifically, the literature is scarce with respect to understanding the mechanisms that may help or harm family firms in their internationalization strategies and the impact of these strategies on firm performance. In my dissertation, I use property rights theory to argue that family firms are able to minimize their negotiating and policing costs, allowing them to benefit from internationalization, but not in all environments. I add to the literature by further finding that family firms internationalize more in environments that have lower levels of legal and political, physical, and intellectual property rights. Also, I find that family firms experience higher performance in environments that have lower levels of property rights protection. Therefore, this dissertation creates various avenues for future research, and provides more evidence toward the superiority of family firms in some, but not all environments.

This study investigates how family ownership affects firms' financing decisions in Sweden. The study uses data on publicly listed firms in Sweden from 2014-2019 with 730 firm-year observations. Sweden has a significant portion of family firms and a business environment where control-enhancing mechanisms are used to a large extent. Agency theory and previous studies suggest that higher leverage is applied by controlling families to maintain corporate control and avoid ownership dilution. The reason is that family owners have undiversified portfolios and a strong long-term business commitment. The hypothesis is tested with fixed effects regressions. The findings show that family firms tend to be more leveraged than non-family firms, although family ownership does not impact the financing decisions of Swedish companies. The reason is that higher firm leverage in family-controlled firms is not caused by the family ownership characteristics but rather by firm-specific characteristics, such as larger firm size, lower profitability and higher tangibility, compared to their counterparts. These results imply that Swedish family companies do not apply debt issuance as a control-enhancing mechanism to preserve firm control and avoid ownership dispersion.

Abstract Background: Sweden has a long history of family-owned investment companies, and they are a big part of today’s financial composition. Mergers & Acquisitions is a well-established term which refers to the process of two or more companies calling for a restruction of the corporate order. However, a large number of M&A’s end up failing and one reason behind this could be the complexity of juggling between hard and soft values in the acquisition process.  Purpose: The purpose of this study is to look at and explore how family-owned investment companies manage to juggle between the soft and hard values in their pre-acquisition processes. Further the study aims to provide insights into how family values and their governance of these companies impact their overall M&A process. Method: This study employed a qualitative research design. The empirical data were gathered by conducting semi-structured interviews with nine different individuals employed at six different companies within the M&A industry. Furthermore, an abductive approach was used, and a thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the gathered data.  Conclusion: Family-owned investment companies have shown that they can successfully manage to juggle the hard and soft values of the M&A process. Mainly through their great experience of building companies as entrepreneurs and therefore applying soft values to the equation, this together with the use of external management weighing up with the hard values to find balance between the two. The shaping of the strategy enabling them to juggle between the two is mainly built around the idea of long-term thinking and including entrepreneurs in their companies through co-owning, enabling them to use the skills and network at hand.

White collar corporate corruption continues to be prevalent in the United States, costing shareholders billions of dollars annually. This study of the collapse of Coudersport, PA firm, Adelphia Communications, explored how and why leadership of this prominent and successful company made unethical decisions, created an atmosphere of moral disengagement, and led to the downfall of the company. Taped interviews with 10 executives who were employed at the company during the years of its rise and demise (1996-2006) were transcribed, hand coded, and analyzed to explore the ethical culture and leadership practices at Adelphia. These insights offer a possible explanation for the behavior that resulted in the collapse of the company. The theoretical framework for this qualitative case study included ethical work climate, moral cognitive theory, and the theory of moral disengagement. Results showed that the collapse of Adelphia was enabled by intense family control, low empowerment, and extreme greed and entitlement on the part of the founders who never made a clear business transition from being family-owned to a publicly-traded corporation. Additionally, proper oversight by the board and outside auditors was lacking. These findings may contribute to positive social change in the areas of ethical training and in creating and operationalizing corporate values in day-to-day decision making in the corporate environment. These findings also suggest further need for new legislative issues beyond existing law to hold external consultants involved in fiduciary responsibility more accountable.

In my study, I examine the relationship between founding family ownership and firm performance. Using publicly listed companies in Indonesia, I observe families are much more prevalent than in the US; in my sample, families are present in over 60% of Indonesian listed companies and families own an average outstanding equity of 50.4%. Contrary to previous literatures, I present new evidence to show founding family ownership and control is a more efficient form of ownership structure only when the family is a majority-shareholder in the company. Additional investigations shows that founding family ownership has a U-shaped quadratic relationship with firm performance, indicating that an increase in family ownership is initially associated with worsening firm performances, but is then associated with improving firm performances after passing a certain level of equity ownership.

The purpose of our paper is to study how ownership structure affects ARL (audit report lag) in Swedish companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. In particular, family ownership (FAMO), institutional ownership (INSO) and foreign ownership (FORO) are analysed. Audit report lag is defined as the period between the end of a fiscal year to the signing of the audit report, which is directly followed by the release of an annual report. Based on a sample of 814 firm-year observations for Swedish-listed firms for 2020-2022, this study finds a significant negative relationship between audit report lag and both family and foreign ownership. The results indicate that audit report lag decreases when family and foreign ownership increases. Moreover, the findings suggest that family-owned firms have a shorter audit report lag compared to non-familyowned firms. No statistically significant relationship was discovered between ARL and institutional ownership. Arguments for our results can be found in the agency theory, signalling theory, and consequently the reputational hypothesis. Companies with certain ownership structures may try to signal certain information to investors to achieve the best possible reputation and external perception. Signalling theory has implications for companies that want to combat agency theory type 2 through timely reporting.

本研究以2003年到2012年國內上市上櫃公司作為研究對象，探討公司治理與公司績效之關聯性，以及家族與非家族企業公司治理對於公司績效之差異性。公司治理衡量方式是參考葉銀華、李存修與柯承恩（2002），設定一個公司治理綜合指標，綜合指標下有五個構面，為董監事組成、股東權益、管理型態、關係人與介入股市構面，各構面下有其所屬變數，將變數評分後，彙總於該變數所屬構面，最後再依照各構面之重要程度加權過後，即形成公司治理綜合指標。實證結果如下： 一、以全體企業、家族企業和非家族企業為樣本群，皆顯示當公司治理越好時，公司績效越好。 二、在資產報酬率與每股盈餘應變數下，家族企業之公司治理綜合指標對公司績效正向影響程度小於非家族企業。 三、以公司治理綜合指標下之五個構面，分別去探討家族企業與非家族企業對於公司績效之差異。董監事組成構面下之家族企業對公司績效正向影響程度大於非家族企業；股東權益、管理型態、關係人與介入股市構面之各個實證結果，皆是家族企業對公司績效正向影響程度小於非家族企業。 / This study investigates the relation between corporate governance and performance and the difference in that relation between family and non-family ownership using a sample of publicly-traded Taiwanese companies during 2003-2012. Based on Ye, Lee, and Ke (2002, in Chinese), a composite index of corporate governance is set up from five constructs including director and supervisor, shareholders' equity, management style, overinvestment and related party. The empirical results are as follows: 1.The better the corporate governance, the better the corporate performance. This finding is true for each of the three samples including family ownership, non-family ownership and both of them together. 2.Taking return on assets (ROA) or earnings per share (EPS) as corporate performance measure, the effect of corporate governance on performance is stronger for family ownership than for non-family ownership. 3.Except for director and supervisor construct, all other four constructs of corporate governance including shareholders' equity construct, management style construct, overinvestment construct and related party construct have stronger effect on corporate performance for non-family ownership than for family ownership.

Texten i årsredovisningen är relativt oreglerad och utgör en möjlighet för företag att påverka investerarnas uppfattning om företaget genom ett narrativ som gynnar företagets mål och syften. Impression management och pollyannaeffekten används för att förklara varför företag tenderar att vara optimistiska kring sina prestationer och vill framställa sig på ett fördelaktigt sätt. Tidigare forskning inom impression management studerar generellt ägare som en homogen grupp. Studien kompletterar tidigare forskning inom impression management genom att undersöka familjeägandets påverkan på förekomsten av impression management. Familjeägare har starkare incitament att säkerställa att ledningen agerar i deras intresse baserat på deras unika karaktärsdrag i jämförelse med andra ägare, vilket minskar informationsasymmetrin mellan ledningen och ägare. Impression management undersöks genom en kvantitativ innehållsanalys av företagens VD-ord som undersöker framtoning, betoning och prestationsjämförelse. En undersökning av 100 slumpmässigt utvalda svenska börsnoterade företags VD-ord visar att samtliga företag presenterar övervägande positiv information. Studien visar även att familjeägda företag är mindre benägna att använda sig av impression management i jämförelse med icke-familjeägda företag. / The text in the annual report is relatively unregulated and constitutes an opportunity for firms to influence investors' perceptions of the company through a narrative that benefits the firm's objectives. Impression management and the Pollyanna effect are used to explain why firms tend to be optimistic about their performance and why they wish to present themselves in a self-serving way. Owners have in previous research on Impression management been treated as a homogenous group. This study complements previous Impression management research by examining the impact of family ownership on the prevalence of Impression management. Family owners have, in comparison to other owners, stronger incentives to ensure that managers act in the interest of the family based on the unique characteristics of family ownership, which reduces the information asymmetry between the management and family owner. Impression management is examined through a quantitative content analysis of companies' CEO letters. In specific, the content analysis examines the tone, emphasis and performance comparisons. The findings of 100 randomly selected Swedish public listed firms' CEO letters show that all firms communicate mainly positive information. The findings also show that firms owned by families are less prone to use impression management in comparison to non-family firms. This study is written in Swedish.

Bakgrund: De enskilda privata skogsägarna är en heterogen grupp som har genomgått en förändring under de senaste åren. Olika karaktärsdrag och olika förhållanden till skogen leder till olika värden med ägandet. Studien undersöker skogsägarnas incitament och beslutsfattande genom att studera skogsägarnas socioemotionella värden med hjälp av SEW-teorin. Syfte: Studien förklarar (1) vilka förutsättningar hos skogsägare som leder till socioemotionellt välstånd och (2) hur det socioemotionella välståndet påverkar beslutsfattande.  Metod: Studien baseras på en kvantitativ tvärsnittsdesign för att undersöka studiens syfte. Hypoteserna har utvecklats utifrån SEW-teorin och forskning kring skogsägande. För att testa hypoteserna har en enkätundersökning genomförts i samarbete med Södra Skogsägarna. Slutsats: Studien bevisar att SEW-teorin är en applicerbar teori på skogsägare. Det visar att det socioemotionella välståndet påverkar skogsägarnas incitament och beslutsfattande. Studiens resultat visar även att deras socioemotionella och ekonomiska värden ökar tillsammans. Studien finner vissa indikatorer på faktorer som genererar SEW samt finner flera effekter av SEW på skogsverksamheten. / Background: The private forest owners are a heterogeneous group that has undergone a change under the past years. They have different characteristics and different relationships to their forest, that leads to their values with their ownership. The study examines the incentives and decision-making process through socioemotional values of forest owners using the SEW-theory. Purpose: The study explains (1) the conditions of forest owners that lead to socioemotional wealth and (2) how socioemotional wealth affects decision making. Method: The study is based on a quantitative cross-sectional design to investigate the purpose of the study. The hypotheses have been developed based on SEW-theory and research on forest ownership, a survey was conducted in collaboration with Södra Skogsägarna.   Conclusions: The study proves that SEW-theory is an applicable theory for forest owners. It shows that socioemotional wealth affects the incentive and decision making of forest owners. The results of the study also shows that their socioemotional and economic values increases together. The study find some indication of factors generating SEW and some initial evidence of effects on the forestry orchestrated by SEW.