This paper investigates how family ownership affects firm performance among Swedish publicly listed firms during the Covid-19 pandemic. The period of interest is the second quarter of 2020 which is argued to be the period of the largest impact on the economy from the Covid-19 pandemic. During this period, we hypothesize that firm performance is influenced by family ownership due to agency conflicts. Our findings suggest that family firms with a present founding family member in the management outperform other firms in general. However, firm performance is not affected by family ownership during the Covid-19 period. We also consider different aspects of family ownership such as the level of stake controlled by the family, and whether the family firm uses a dual-class share system. Inconsistent with our hypotheses, our results show that a moderate stake controlled by the family is not associated with higher performance, and family firms that use the dual-class share system do not suffer in performance. Overall, our findings indicate that the Covid-19 pandemic did not impact firm performance contrary to our expectations. Lastly, this paper highlights an issue of sensitivity in the results depending on the family firm definition and the chosen measure for firm performance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-447186 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Sigfridsson, Edward, Becerril Peral, Daniel |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Företagsekonomiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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