This study examines the impact of family involvement in ownership and control on firms’ R&D intensity, relying on panel data on publicly held firms in Canada over the 2004 to 2009 time period. The literature on the link between family firms and R&D is unclear: although some characteristics may promote R&D intensity in family firms, others factors may have a negative effect. Thus, the authors propose a theoretical framework whereby differences in R&D intensity between family and nonfamily firms are explained based on key conditions, including time horizon, agency costs, resource endowment, or risk-taking behavior. The findings of this study show that publicly traded family firms in Canada record lower R&D intensity compared with nonfamily firms and, therefore, support one side of the previous literature over the other.

We examine the effect of combining internal and external R&D loci on innovation performance in family firms (FF) and nonfamily firms (non-FFs). Our longitudinal analysis of 27,438 firm-year observations of Spanish manufacturing firms from 1990 to 2016 shows that FFs can better exploit the benefits of simultaneously engaging in internal and external R&D activities, leading to a positive effect on innovation performance. Moreover, the relationship between combined internal and external R&D and innovation performance in FFs is contingent upon firm economic performance. By pointing to the importance of taking into account the combination of internal and external R&D loci to foster innovation in FFs, we challenge current family business innovation research.

This paper analyzes wage differentials between male and female workers in the Spanish tourism industry, using a large, administratively matched employer-employee data set obtained from a representative sample of companies. This allows us to control for unobserved firm-specific factors likely to affect the magnitude of the gender wage gap. Our findings indicate that male workers earn on average 6.7% higher monthly wages than their socially comparable female counterparts. In particular, the type of contract held, the qualifications required for the job and the specific sub-sector of employment are very important variables in explaining this gender wage difference. We also find that only around 12% of the mean wage difference in the tourism industry cannot be explained by differences in observable characteristics, which is well below the average for the rest of the industries in Spain (87%). Our interpretation is that minimum wage legislation provides a particularly effective protection to women in the tourism industry, which is characterized by a large number of low-wage earners.

Bertrand and Hallock (2001: 3) present compelling evidence that female executives in the United States earned 45 percent less total compensation than their male counterparts for 1992-1997. We complement their results by analyzing data over a longer time period and, more importantly, contend that most of the unexplained gender difference in total pay among executives was due to gender differences in the portion of variable pay, in particular a different cash payout from stock option exercises.

While prior literature has focused on whether family firms are more or less inclined to diversification than non-family firms, the examination of differences in diversification among family firms has received much less attention. We analyze how family involvement (in ownership, control, and management) and the generational stage in the company (first versus later generations) influence diversification among family firms. The empirical evidence is provided by a sample of publicly listed family firms from the EU. Our results show that larger levels of family involvement in the firm are associated with lower diversification. Furthermore, first-generation family firms are found to be less diversified than their later-generation counterparts.