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We study the relationship between leverage and the willingness of listed family firms to dilute control, proxied by the ownership of the main shareholder. We find that the main owner's stake positively impacts on leverage and that this impact is stronger when the business is a young family firm. Furthermore, the life cycle matters when analyzing this relationship. These results allow us to argue that owners with a greater stake prefer to raise finance via debt rather than dilute their position via equity, and that family firms face a trade-off between their control risk aversion and the need for external financing.

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This paper analyses the effect of family ownership on the outcome of the firm’s risk‐taking activities, measured by the company’s default risk. We show that family ownership reduces the probability of default, which is proxied by the Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) model. Our study goes further than the initial approach by taking into account certain factors conditioning the aforementioned relationship. We find that the expected negative relationship between family ownership and default risk is modified when there is a significant participation of institutional investors, whose positive moderating influence intensifies if they are stable and long‐term oriented and/or during adverse financial circumstances.

While past work finds support for both higher and lower cost of debt among family firms, whether lower shareholder-creditor agency conflicts in family firms translate into greater exante contracting efficiency (i.e., lower debt contract strictness) remains unexplored. Drawing on a shareholder-creditor agency framework and costly contracting theory, creditors, expecting firm value maximization rather than shareholder value maximization from family firms, may offer less strict debt contracts to increase contracting efficiency. We find in a sample of 716 publicly traded US firms (2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)) that family firms have less strict debt contracts, which are even less strict when family firms have higher asset tangibility. Although increases in R&D investments could lead to more pronounced shareholder-creditor agency conflicts, given family firms' preferences for lower risk and growth, debt contract strictness among family firms is not positively associated with higher R&D intensity.

Recent financial downturns, characterized by the significant failures of firms, have revealed the need to control credit risk. Latest literature has shown that weak corporate governance structures are related to high levels of default risk, leading to financial instability. In this context, we aim to summarize the literature that focuses on the role that internal corporate governance plays in the credit risk of firms, specifically considering three corporate governance components: ownership structure, board structure and financial stakeholders' rights and relations. Additionally, we analyse whether the effectiveness of the internal mechanisms depends on particular key factors, especially the institutional setting and the type of mechanisms considered. Finally, new lines of research are identified for future research.

Our objective is to disentangle which family business characteristics enable family ownership to be an effective corporate governance mechanism. To this aim, we investigate whether the relationship between ownership concentration and firm value is moderated by the type of family influence. This study shows that family control positively affects performance, primarily when family members serve on the board and when the founder is still influential. Our findings hold when we control for the general blockholder effect and they are robust to a battery of tests. We conclude that the impact of ownership concentration on firm value differs across family firms.