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Companies in general and family businesses in particular engage in local collaborations in rather diverse areas through their corporate social responsibility activities. The COVID-19 pandemic has made these contributions to community improvement more apparent, suggesting a paradigm shift. This conceptual paper proposes a reflection about the evolution of the corporate social responsibility activities linked to family businesses in emergencies and from the socioemotional wealth perspective. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it provides an in-depth reflection on the evolution of philanthropy, posing the following questions: are we witnessing a reinvention of corporate social responsibility within the framework of family businesses because of the global pandemic; does this new trend deserve support, given the fundamental role that family businesses have played in this situation; and if so, what should such support consist of, and what is the optimal channel for articulating it? Secondly, the paper proposes a theoretical framework from the socioemotional wealth perspective to advance research about corporate social responsibility carried out by family businesses. Business families are more likely to implement strategies that promote ethical behavior and CSR activities in their companies. The pandemic situation has created new possibilities for developing CSR.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to find throughout history examples of wealth management of a family or business families that can be assimilated into the current concept of family offices (FOs). In such examples, the study identifies characteristics associated with the different dimensions of the concept of socioemotional wealth (SEW).Design/methodology/approachDrawing on the socioemotional perspective, this paper relates significant examples of FOs based on historical stages (ancient history, the middle ages, modern history, the contemporary period and the actual world). Each case is discussed with an effort to identify the dimensions of the SEW that fit and help in understanding the organization studied.FindingsMainly, FOs allow the management of the family legacy, philanthropy, promotion of entrepreneurship and family wealth preservation for future generations. Autonomy in decision-making, privacy and confidentiality and the achievement of more intangible goals make the FO preferable to other institutions. Through the study of historical cases, the FO constitutes a structure with objectives and activities that have remained consistent from Rome to the present, regardless of historical, political or social context. The results also identify four out of five FIBER dimensions of SEW.Originality/valueIn addition to contributing to the scarce literature on FOs, this paper uses various examples of historical periods to better understand its origin, evolution and current state. A selection of examples at different times allows us to verify that FOs undergo a series of changes throughout history but maintain their characteristics regardless of the historical context. This paper is the first to explore the origin and development of the FO as organization. Building on the findings, the authors present a conceptual SEW framework to deepen in the knowledge of FO. This framework could help researchers and practitioners in future researches providing a conceptual link that demonstrates the components of the SEW perspective best fit the objectives pursued by business families when establishing a family office.

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Background The relative lack of flexibility of parametric models has led to the development of nonparametric regression techniques based on the family of generalized additive models. However, despite the potential advantages of using Generalized Additive Model (GAM) in practice many models have, until now, not been sufficiently explored in health economics problems. It could be interesting to calculate a new flexible hospital production function by means of a GAM including interactions and to compare it with the classic model Cobb-Douglas in the prediction of the behavior of productive factors. Method The flexible model considered has been the AM including the beds-facultative interaction. The covariates “Hospital”, being a categorical variable and “Year” being a continuous variable, have also been included in the model. Based on the estimation of the model penalized thin plate splines will be used to represent smoothed functions. In this configuration, the smoothed parameters will be estimated via REML. Results Cobb-douglas model fits well for the production functions of the more general clinical and surgical services, while the GAM adjusts better in the case of more specialized medical services. Conclusions Generalized Additive Models are more flexible than parametric models, providing a better fit in the presence of non-linear relationships and thus allowing more accurate prediction values. The results of this study suggest that AM is a promising technique for the areas of research and application in health economics.