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PurposeFamily ownership is very common for Jordanian businesses, leading to a high level of involvement of family members in company management. There continues to be intense discussion on the pros and cons of family ownership, particularly as it focuses corporate control within a small family group. The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of family- and non-family-owned banks that appear on the Amman Stock Exchange over the 2016 to 2020 period.Design/methodology/approachThe research on Jordanian domestic banks is based on data from the annual reports of banks listed on their websites which offers comprehensive data on finances, ownership and the board. Family-owned and non-family banks were analysed using multiple regression technique to identify any variations in their performance.FindingsUsing a sample of 16 domestic banks with 75 bank-year observations over the 2016 to 2020 period, the study supports other research in finding that family ownership is negatively related to bank performance. This is true for accounting-based and market-based performance measures, including return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Tobin's Q test results. Additionally, analysis identifies greater negative consequences for performance within family-owned banks by board of directors.Originality/valueThis paper extends previous research on family businesses by investigating the impact of family ownership on the financial performance in the Jordanian bank sector. This research determined that devaluation is a consequence of higher levels of ownership concentration for domestic banks in Jordan.

This paper investigates whether the COVID-19 cases and death rates affect the dynamic correlation of corporate-government bond yields. Therefore, this study uses the daily corporate bond data with different ratings of bonds along with the COVID-19 data at both the US and global levels. Using the quantile regression approach, it produces the following results. First, the impact of daily cases differs from that of death rates both locally and globally. Second, the impact of local cases and death cases on the government-AAA yields correlation at a given quantile tends to reverse when the BBB bonds are used in the analysis. Third, global death rates significantly affect the correlation series the most at the higher quantiles. Lastly, AAA-rated bonds show higher sensitivity to COVID-19 cases and death rates than BBB-rated bonds. This finding indicates that relatively high-quality bonds are more susceptible to the pandemic period and thus calls for careful evaluation of assets included in investors’ portfolios. This study assumes that local COVID-19 data provide a better implication for constructing bond portfolios than global data. That is, their economic impact depends on the rating of the bond and tends to vary more across correlation quantiles.