A recent stream of research has focused on tax aggressiveness, the downward management of taxable income through tax planning activities, and has analyzed its antecedents and consequences, mainly on public companies. Only very few studies, however, have been carried out in the context of private family business and have investigated whether some family firms are more tax aggressive than others, considering some specific features of family firms, such as their distinctive agency conflicts and socioemotional wealth. In this paper, we investigate the antecedents of tax aggressiveness in a sample of private Italian family firms. Our research findings show that tax aggressiveness is positively associated with ownership concentration, the presence of independent members in the board, and the adoption of reporting mechanisms. Instead, we found a negative relation between tax aggressiveness and the use of both strategic planning and a combination of managerial control systems (both planning and reporting mechanisms). We did not find any relation between family CEO and tax aggressiveness. In summary, overall, our findings show that family involvement in ownership, an independent board. and managerialization (the use of managerial mechanisms) are relevant antecedents of tax aggressiveness in private family businesses.

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This paper aims to analyze the role of professionalization (the involvement of professional non-family managers) and of managerialization (the use of managerial mechanisms) in the family firm’s succession process. In the light of the scarce literature on such issues, it aims to "open the black box", giving some insights on the relationship between the involvement of non-family managers, the use of managerial mechanisms, such as strategic planning (SP) and management control systems (MCSs), and family business succession. This is an explorative paper aimed at developing a theoretical framework on the outlined issues. The research method is based on the longitudinal analysis of a case study of a European medium-sized family firm, that made different choices in terms of: 1) how to cope with the family succession, 2) the involvement of non-family members, and 3) the role assigned to SP and MCSs. The longitudinal analysis of the case study shows that non-family professional managers may have a relevant role in the family firm’s succession, but in particular former employees of the company. A significant role of both family and firm governance mechanisms is also showed. Instead, managerial mechanisms, such as SP and MCSs, are introduced mostly to cope with firm’s and environment’s complexity and agency conflicts. Consistently with research findings, we propose a research framework, articulated in a few propositions, concerning the role of professionalization and managerialization in helping family firms to overcome generation succession

The economics of ecosystems and biodiversity (TEEB, 2010) has emphasized the importance of business sectors involved in ecology, biodiversity, and the environ-ment's entire conservation and protection process. Corporate sustainability raises the question of how environmental and social management can be better integrat-ed into economic business goals. The latter is important in order to trace the actual impact of firms' actions on the environment by means of disclosure reports and in order to identify and promote business organizations' virtuous behaviour. We investigate the type of information provided on natural capital and its posi-tioning within the integrated report (IR) body (the locus). This element is critical in order to understand whether the information provided is effective and, if so, whether it is likely to be translated into actions that impact the environment tangi-bly. We undertook an empirical analysis of the IR corpus's disclosure of natural capi-tal in order to trace whether and, if so, how natural capital information is embod-ied in business activities, notably in IR's business model (BM) section. We did so by investigating South African IR a very promising research domain, due to the environmental wealth and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange regulation that mandates listed companies to provide an IR. Our study sheds lights on real commitment to sustainability, discussing the type of information that the companies provide and its link to strategy implementation.

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