Institutional framework, concentration of ownership and results of large family corporations in Latin America and Spain

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to clarify the relationship between institutional framework, concentration of ownership in family firms and results. Design/methodology/approach – Data comprises two samples of family firms from eight Latin American countries and Spain in the year 2010. The first sample contains the largest 20 corporations from each country. The second comprises the 20 largest listed family corporations in each country. To test the hypothesis, the study uses ordinary least squares. Findings – First, firms located in countries with a higher than average quality of the institutional and regulatory frameworks are less concentrated in ownership than firms located in countries with lower than average quality and development of institutional and regulatory framework. Second, the influence of the concentration of the ownership in the performance is more important in countries with higher developed institutional and regulatory frameworks. Finally, first-generation large family firms obtain higher results than large family firms in second generation or beyond. Research limitations/implications – The study is limited to one year and there are few family firms in Latin American countries. The study only considers some features of ownership, and there is no information about board of directors ' composition. Practical implications – Institutional framework determines concentration of ownership in family firms and the influence of concentration of ownership in performance. Originality/value – The study provides new evidence in areas of corporate governance and family firms, analysing a sample of Latin American and Spanish firms, representatives of the civil legal system and a weaker institutional framework. The study uses the corruption perception index like a control variable.

Family business and local development in Iberoamerica

“…Marino et al, 2002) or firm performance (e.g. Galve-Górriz and Hernandez-Trasobares, 2015). This represents the most developed stage for analyzing and comparing family firms across contexts, i.e., when the context is incorporated into the research strategy.…”

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Ownership Concentration and Firm Performance in European Emerging Economies: A Meta-Analysis

“…1 In line with the above theoretical debates, the empirical results presented by previous studies are also diverse in their content and views. In fact, even studies recently published on the topic in both developed and developing economies 2 are more or less equally divided between two extremes: those presenting empirical findings supporting the alignment hypothesis (Ma et al, 2010;Cabeza-García and Gómez-Ansón, 2011;Galve-Górriz and Hernández-Trasobares, 2015; da Cunha and Bortolon, 2016) and those presenting findings to the contrary (Omran et al, 2008;Setia-Atmaja, 2009;Weiss and Hilger, 2012;Bednarek and Moszoro, 2014). Furthermore, although a certain amount of attention has been given to both the potential nonlinearity between ownership concentration and firm performance and the endogeneity between the degree of ownership concentration and firm performance, the conclusions reached by preceding empirical works are widely divergent (Hu and Izumida, 2008;Omran, 2009;Gul et al, 2010).…”