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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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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.

This paper presents panel evidence on the productivity effects of middle managers’ off‐the‐job formal training in Italy. It is based on a rich and reliable panel dataset covering all sectors of the Italian economy over the period 2006–2011. We employ panel data techniques and self‐selection models to show that off‐the‐job formal training for middle management has a significant nonlinear exogenous effect on total factor productivity. Moreover, results indicate that middle managers’ off‐the‐job formal training is more effective in larger firms and that different training methods have heterogeneous effects on productivity.

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