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This article aims to review and systematize prior works that investigate how the presence of women in top echelon positions of firms affects sustainability and to create an agenda to guide future research in this promising area. In contrast to previous reviews, ours examines how women in top echelon positions affect sustainability by distinguishing both the position women held in the firm (i.e. Board of Directors—BoD, top management team, CEO and relevant committees) and the specific elements of sustainability (i.e. activity, performance, and disclosure). Our structured systematic review resulted in 187 publications retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus and revealed that the presence of women in top echelon positions is associated with greater engagement in social and environmental projects. Their presence also positively influences the environmental and social performance and increases the level, quality, and transparency of sustainability disclosure. Furthermore, the presence of women in top echelon positions and the implementation of sustainable activities improve both the firm financial performance and value. However, conflicting results have also emerged. On the basis of these findings, research gaps and future research agenda are identified and presented.

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Purpose The key research question for this study was whether the spatial network structure offered by the global airline system contributes to the development of Italian inward Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs). We argue that the introduction of a new route, by reducing firm's transport costs and facilitating tacit and complex knowledge flow, should increase the likelihood of FDI exchange between newly connected regions. Methods We employed a comparison group design considering both small and medium enterprises and large companies at the municipality level.Results The results showed that FDIs increased overall by 33.7% in the two years after opening of the new routes while FDIs in the control group decreased by 16.6%. Similar results were obtained using different measures of FDI (i.e. the number of generated employees) and by weighting the routes by their frequencies. Conclusions Given the substantial benefits that urban areas can obtain from attracting multinational firms, our results provide new evidence of the contribution of transport infrastructures to local development. From a policymaker perspective, regional policies aimed at attracting FDIs must contextually promote the development of transport infrastructure and in particular international airports. Investments to improve air transport capacity, strategies to attract both traditional and low-cost airlines, providing legal authorization or financing ground transport are all critical aspects for the success of such policies.

This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between family business (FB) and human resource management (HRM) abroad. Our analysis provides two main results. First, not all organizational attributes of FBs exert the same effect on the approach to HRM abroad. Whereas participation of family members in the board of directors displays no significant impact, ownership and family managerial models favor the exploitation of the human resources supplied by the parent company. In contrast, the involvement of young successors favors an explorative attitude. Second, a multidimensional approach has better explanatory power compared with a dichotomous classification of FBs

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This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between family firms features and their international growth. In particular, our aim is to understand how the family impacts on the degree of internationalization of a multinational firm.The sample is composed of 361Italian multinational companies affiliated with 5,348 foreign firmsin the period 1994-2013.Our results show that the involvement of the family in the ownership is negatively associated with the level of internationalization of a firm, while governance has no effect. In contrast, the presence of young successors favors the development of the business abroad.Moreover, the negative effect of the family ownership is enhanced for firms that didn't employ external manager. On the contrary the negative effect of family ownership on the level of internationalization of a firm is lower for firms without successor.