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Purpose Empirical studies provide conflicting conclusions regarding the corporate social performance (CSP) of family firms. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the existing empirical evidence and examine the potential role of research design and contextual factors. Design/methodology/approach A meta-analysis of existing empirical studies was performed to examine the role of sampling, measurement and contextual factors in explaining the different and often conflicting results of empirical studies in the family business literature. Findings The overall relationship between family firms and CSP is positive. The relationship between family firms and CSP is positive for private family firms but is negative for public family firms. The relationship between family firms and CSP is positive when family involvement includes both family ownership and management as opposed to only family ownership or family management. Private family firms care more and public family firms care less about the community, environment, and employees than private and public nonfamily firms. The relationship between family firms and CSP is stronger in institutional environments with weak labor and corporate governance regulatory frameworks. Research limitations/implications The operationalization of both the family firm and CSP constructs significantly predicts the magnitude and direction of the relationship between family firms and CSP. Practical implications Family firms should become more skilled at measuring and disseminating information about the firm’s CSP. Family firms should work to improve public perceptions about the CSP of family firms. Social implications Policy should encourage family firms to remain privately owned by the family. Policy should also incentivize the involvement of family owners in the management of family firms. Originality/value Although several literature reviews address the relationship between family firms and CSP, this is the first review to use the meta-analysis method. The authors contribute to the family business literature by analyzing how differences in study-, firm- and country-level factors can explain some of the variance in the results of the studies in the literature.

We revisit the assertion that entrepreneurs are uniquely characterized in their ways of thinking; specifically being relatively more prone to the overconfidence bias and the representativeness heuristic in their decision-making. We replicate an earlier seminal study in entrepreneurial cognition, with a wider and more current survey. We then extend that analysis by investigating whether such "different thinking" leads to different (i.e., less rational) choices and different (i.e., worse) firm performance. Given the expected differences, we also investigate whether there exist other factors that affect the use of such biases and heuristics, to control their effects on focal outcomes.

Research summary We meta‐analyze the structural relationship between human capital, the ability to generate new venture ideas, and the favorability of opportunity beliefs to address divergent theoretical predictions and inconsistent empirical findings. We test a two‐stage process model of entrepreneurial opportunity identification, distinguishing between the ability to generate new venture ideas and the favorability of third and first‐person opportunity beliefs. We also distinguish between two categories of human capital: general and specific human capital. Our results suggest that general and specific human capital are positively associated with the ability to generate new venture ideas. Furthermore, only specific human capital matters in influencing the favorability of opportunity beliefs, yet the ability to generate new venture ideas is far more important than human capital for the favorability of opportunity beliefs. Managerial summary How does an individual's human capital relate to the attractiveness of opportunities identified? In this study, we review the body of literature on this topic and analyze the relationships between two types of human capital—general and specific human capital, the ability to generate new venture ideas, and the attractiveness of opportunities. We find that both general human capital—primarily education and work experience—and specific human capital—industry and entrepreneurial experience—are useful for generating new venture ideas. However, only specific human capital is useful when assessing which new venture ideas can turn into attractive opportunities. We also find that the ability to generate new venture ideas is more strongly associated with the attractiveness of opportunities than either type of human capital.

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