Intentional Investing: Aligning Investment Policies with Family Values and Objectives: This research focuses on family investment policies, a popular governance mechanisms that has gone virtually unstudied. We explore how families can align investment policies with their shared values, diverse goals,and long-term aspirations, while balancing financial and non-financial goals and mitigating conflicts that arise from within-family heterogeneity.

Project members: Claudia Binz Astrachan, Anneleen Michiels, Chris Graves, and Massimo Baù

Do We Practice What We Preach? Execution Gaps in Family Governance: In this research project, we investigate how discrepancies between what has been codified and agreed upon in family governance, and actual observable behaviors can impact long-term family and business functioning and success, to provide actionable recommendations for business families and their advisors.

Project members: Claudia Binz Astrachan and Raphaëlle Mattart

Employee Interfirm Mobility and Compensation Across Family and Non Family firms: This study examines how prior experience in family firms affects employees’ compensation when switching jobs. We find that employees leaving family firms receive higher compensation if they join another family firm but face lower pay when transitioning to non-family firms. These findings highlight family firm experience as a unique labor market friction, shaping employee mobility and wage dynamics.

Project Lead: Massimo Baù

Institutional Advantage, Family Firms, and Acquisitions: This study applies institutional theory to examine how family firms’ unique stakeholder relationships create strategic advantages. We argue that family firms benefit from institutional distinctiveness in their home markets, shaping their acquisition strategies. Specifically, family firms leverage these advantages to pursue acquisitions with a stronger regional and strategic fit. The findings offer insights into how location-based economic benefits influence acquisition decisions.

Project Lead: Massimo Baù

Offspring’s Entrepreneurship Experience and Intrafamily Succession: This study examines how launching an independent venture influences the likelihood of business owners’ children returning to take over the family firm. Drawing on human capital and person-environment fit theories, we argue that entrepreneurship experience can enhance succession potential, but its impact depends on the entrepreneurial nature of both the offspring’s venture and the family business. 

Project Lead: Massimo Baù

Unraveling Differences in Family Firms for Biological vs. Stepchildren: Family firms are often associated with preferential treatment, but how does this play out when biological children and stepchildren work in the business? As family structures evolve through remarriage and blended families, the boundaries of kinship blur, raising questions about how family relationships shape employment and compensation decisions. This study delves into the complexities of family dynamics in business, exploring how deep-seated bonds, upbringing, and implicit succession planning influence the way family members are valued within the firm.

Project Lead: Massimo Baù

Family-Controlled Enterprise Foundations: This study explores how foundation ownership in family firms influences corporate governance. Unlike traditional family ownership, foundation-owned firms have a perpetual principal—the foundation’s purpose—defined by a legal charter. Using agency theory, we analyze conflicts between foundations, family members, and non-family shareholders. The study aims to understand how family firms navigate foundation ownership to balance legacy, control, and financial sustainability.

Project Lead: Massimo Baù

Charitable and Family Enterprise Foundations as Firm Owners: This study examines how charitable and family enterprise foundations shape acquisition strategies. Firms with charitable foundations as owners pursue more acquisitions, targeting geographically and culturally distant firms, yet remain industry-focused due to the founder’s imprinting effect. The findings offer insights into governance and strategic decision-making in foundation-owned firms.

Project Lead: Massimo Baù

Shared Family Legacy and Family Philanthropy: A relevant part of achieving continuity for business families is being able to transfer the family legacy across generations. Taking a qualitative view, this study explores how business families utilize philanthropic actions in the transfer of family legacy and how this process is meaningful to them. We find that philanthropy enables business families to connect with one another and have a space to develop a shared understanding of their family legacy. This shared legacy is co-constructed between members of different generations, which helps to make it relevant to each generation and helps to promote legacy continuity.

Project members: Rosane Dal Magro, Rosane, Isabel Botero & Luis Felipe Cisneros Martinez

Family offices and their effects on the next generation’s entrepreneurial intent: Family offices are becoming a key organization in the family-related organizational ecosystems. These organizations exist to help preserve, administer, and transform the wealth of the family by engaging in investment, family and administrative related activities. Through the enactment activities they create a dependence of the next generation particularly through concierge services. In this study we explore the conditions under which this dependence of the next generation can impact their entrepreneurial intent. 

Project members: Isabel Botero, Luis Felipe Cisneros Martinez & Tom Fediuk

Family Constitutions: Family constitutions are one of the most used family governance practices. This document helps business families articulate their strategy to guide the relationships between family, ownership, and business roles. In this study we explore the family conditions that facilitate the development of the constitution, and the process that families go through while deciding whether or not a family constitution can help them.

Project members: Isabel Botero, S. Prigge, K. Mengers