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Purpose This paper aims to perform empirical analysis to test whether less severe agency conflict between managers and controlling shareholders may improve family firms’ corporate and stock liquidity, compared to non-family firms. Design/methodology/approach The authors use the ordinary least square and two-stage generalized method of moments regression analyses. They also use match-paired design for robustness check. Findings Focusing on Standard & Poor’s 500 firms, the authors find that family firms are more conservative by hoarding more corporate liquid assets (as measured by accounting balance sheet liquidity ratios) than their peer non-family firms to prevent underinvestment from external costly finance. These family firms also exhibit higher level of stock liquidity and lower liquidity risk as measured by effective bid–ask spread than non-family firms. The results are consistent with the motivation that organizations (i.e. family firms in this study) whose shareholders can efficiently monitor that their managers are associated with higher level of corporate liquidity and stock liquidity, and lower level of liquidity risk. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature on liquidity (both corporate liquidity and stock liquidity) and ownership structure, more broadly corporate governance. It provides insights into corporate and stock liquidity within a unique ownership context: family firms versus non-family firms. Family firms in the USA are subject to both Type I (agency problems arising from the separation of ownership and control) and Type II agency problems (agency conflict arising between majority and minority shareholders). It is an ongoing debate whether family firms suffer more or less agency problems from one type versus the other than non-family firms. The finding that family firms have higher corporate and stock liquidity is consistent with that family firms being subject to less severe agency conflict due to separation of ownership from control.

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Using a dynamic panel data approach to analyze national-level and province-level data in China from 2000 to 2012, this paper studies how real estate investment affects Chinese economic growth. We find that real estate investment has significantly positive contemporaneous effects on economic growth on both national and regional levels. Surprisingly, we also find that real estate investment has negative lagged effects on economic growth. Such negative lagged effects differ among the three regions we investigated: the eastern region shows the most significant effects from real estate investment; while the middle region shows the least. Further examinations of the four types of real estate investment (i.e. housing investment, office building investment, investment for commercial and business purposes, and other investment) show that housing investment exhibits the most influence on the economy in China. Additionally, we find that the four types of real estate investment exhibit significantly negative lagged effects on Chinese economic growth and there are regional differences in the repressive effects of the four types of real estate investments on economic growth.

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