Luiz Ricardo Kabbach de Castro

Family firms are the world’s most common form of business and are admired for their longevity, yet most do not survive beyond the second or third generation. This paradox has produced a large but fragmented literature that attributes longevity to governance, socioemotional, cultural, or entrepreneurial mechanisms, each studied in isolation and at a single level of analysis. We address this fragmentation through a systematic review of 112 studies published between 2009 and 2024 in leading management, entrepreneurship, and family business journals. We ask how the field has evolved, what drives family firm longevity, and how future research can integrate these drivers. Our review organizes the literature into five higher-order dimensions. Family orientation and identity, governance and succession architecture, resource and capability renewal, transgenerational entrepreneurship, and longevity outcomes. We consolidate a working definition of family firm longevity. We position transgenerational entrepreneurship as the mechanism linking family-level drivers to firm survival and renewal. Drawing on the mixed-gamble approach to socioemotional wealth, we reframe the continuity–change paradox as the central tension families must manage to endure. We provide an integrative, multilevel framework and a structured agenda that points future research toward unresolved mechanisms, productive tensions, multilevel contingencies, and underrepresented empirical contexts. Finally, we translate the framework into guidance for the owning families and advisors who must sustain the firm across generations.

In the wake of corporate governance scandals, questions arise about the effectiveness and intent of corporate ethical codes: Are they genuine governance mechanisms to enhance corporate responsibility, or are they mere shields against legal risks? This study delves into the linguistic choices within ethical codes, positing that these choices serve as communication devices that articulate a firm’s institutional logic. We use stakeholder theory to differentiate between code language that is governed by instrumental (legal-oriented) or normative (behavior-oriented) logic. Upon analyzing the lexicon of Fortune 500 corporate codes, our findings reveal that behavior-oriented codes are associated with a decrease in the number of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Yet, they correspond to an increase in class action lawsuits. By contrast, legal-oriented codes are linked to an increase in ESG issues but to reduced legal litigation. Notably, firms that blend approaches from both logics experience lower litigation rates. These findings enrich the discourse on stakeholder theory and provide practical guidance for organizations aiming to refine their ethical codes. This refinement seeks to enhance ethical behavior and mitigate corporate risks.

We examine the role of country‐level legal investor protection (i.e., shareholder and creditor protection) on firm investment–cash flow sensitivity (ICFS). Using underexplored research data on investor protection across 21 countries and working with a conservative empirical design, we extend prior literature on the relation between investor protection and ICFS and provide new evidence on how these country‐level attributes interact to explain a firm's ICFS. We find that either the strong legal protection of minority shareholders or the strong legal protection of creditors reduces the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flow. However, in countries with strong levels of both minority shareholder and creditor protection, ICFS increases. Our results remain robust after controlling for several alternative explanations. The results support the argument that overregulation arises when policymakers increase investor protection at levels that lead firms to avoid external sources of finance, hampering firm investment. Our findings suggest that countries face a regulatory trade‐off such that increasing investor protection (either shareholder or creditors protection) enhances financial markets efficiency, but excessive regulation can indeed lead to financial markets inefficiencies.

Research Question/Issue: Do the motivations of cross‐border minority acquisitions differ from those of domestic minority acquisitions? We examine and compare the underlying motivations for and consequences of domestic and cross‐border minority acquisitions by analyzing data from transactions that took place across 31 countries over a 13‐year period.Research Findings/Insights: Using a sample of 11,926 domestic and cross‐border minority acquisitions, we show that the interplay of financing and country‐level governance motives is the main driver of such deals in both settings. We find that financially constrained firms are more likely to engage in both domestic and cross‐border minority acquisitions, even in the face of higher information asymmetry and transaction costs that international transactions entail. In the wake of either domestic or cross‐border deals, financially constrained firms' long‐term debt increases; their short‐term debt, cash holdings, and equity decrease. The greater likelihood of minority acquisitions of financially constrained firms is explained by the degree of corporate governance institutions in the country in which the targeted firm is based and by differences in levels of creditor and shareholder protections between the home countries of the targeted and acquiring firms involved. Our results remain robust after controlling for alternative explanations such as the contracting motive, the gravity model of foreign transactions, economic development levels, and differences in tax and exchange rates.Theoretical/Academic Implications: Our results extend prior literature on mergers and acquisitions that have focused solely on control transfers or domestic deals. We provide empirical evidence for the importance of jointly considering financing and governance motivations in seeking to explain domestic and cross‐border minority acquisitions and their consequences in alleviating financial constraints. We provide new evidence on how firm‐ and country‐level characteristics interact to affect minority acquisitions.Practitioner/Policy Implications: Our results offer valuable insights for business policy by highlighting how firms can circumvent financial constraints through partial integration, especially in cross‐border settings. The results also offer evidence of beneficial ex post outcomes for targeted firms' leverage and liquidity. In terms of public policy, the results show that minority shareholder protections improve the equity market and provide a positive externality to the debt market through a certification effect.

Resumo Este artigo apresenta as perspectivas da pesquisa em Governança de Empresas Familiares no Brasil, resultantes da chamada desta edição especial da RAC endereçada ao tema. Os dois artigos tratam de temas relevantes no debate acadêmico, a saber: a necessidade de um arcabouço teórico para a avaliação de processos decisórios estratégicos de empresas familiares; e a importância da diversidade de gênero nos conselhos de administração destas empresas. As proposições e evidências elencadas nos dois estudos, relativas aos construtos e variáveis que apresentaram consistência teórica ou estatística, abrem uma nova frente de pesquisa sobre o tema no Brasil, relacionada à conciliação da heterogeneidade da composição dos Conselhos de Administração com a criação de valor em Empresas Familiares.

Efforts to build a universal theory of the world’s business systems require empirical grounding in an understanding of the variety that need explaining. To support such theorizing, we analyzed the institutional structures of 61 major economies, accounting for 93.5% of 2013 world GDP at purchasing power parity. We found nine main types of business systems: Highly Coordinated, Coordinated Market, Liberal Market, European Peripheral, Advanced Emerging, Advanced City, Arab Oil-Based, Emerging, and Socialist Economies. Our findings illustrate the need to go beyond the Varieties of Capitalism and Business Systems frameworks; provide empirical support for the CME versus LME dichotomy for part of the OECD; identify some of the business systems proposed recently as sub-types of larger clusters; indicate that institutional diversity may increase with development level; and cast doubt on the notions of state-led and family-led capitalism as types of business systems. Our discussion further suggests numerous avenues for theory development and empirical research.

Manuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: While corporate governance research is the beneficiary of advances in research methodologies and statistical techniques, less attention has been placed on variable measurement. This paper draws into question the conceptualization and measurement of CEO duality by highlighting its largely unrecognized instability and the challenges instability imposes on measuring dichotomous variables. CEO duality is widely used in corporate governance research and frequently operationalized dichotomously as a dummy variable. We present examples of the frequent changes in duality within organizations which challenge our current view of CEO duality.Research Findings/Insights: We find that the instability of CEO duality in practice varies considerably at both the national and within‐firm levels. We find that a mismatch exists between the current conceptualization of CEO duality, actual patterns of data, and the measures used by governance researchers. The paper draws attention to the limits of conceptualizing and measuring what is seemingly dichotomous data, reviews these in research and in practice, and provides examples, recommendations and assessments of alternate ways existing data can be used.Theoretical/Academic Implications: Our results draw into question the reliance on a simple dichotomous conceptualization and operationalization of CEO duality in governance research. Data limitations of corporate governance research may be alleviated by directly assessing stability of duality within firms and reimagining concepts in ways that can be measured using existing data.Practitioner/Policy Implications: CEO duality, a legal but discouraged governance structure, may be changed intentionally or result from a variety of temporary firm‐level factors. Assessing the longitudinal patterns in duality and underlying causes for temporary changes in duality should be incorporated into evaluations of firm governance structures.