An Investigation of Family Entrepreneurship in Ownership and Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence from Pakistan

In today’s financial economics literature, the impact of innovative family ownership and management on firm performance is a prominent concern. In this study, the existence of family firms in the listed sector of Pakistan’s economy is investigated. The objective of this study is to examine the performance-oriented relationship of family ownership and active involvement of family member at the CEO position. The theoretical perspectives that underpin this research are agency and stewardship. This analysis used a sample of 315 publicly traded companies from 2009 to 2019. The study’s primary independent variables include family influence on ownership and family CEO. Financial performance is the dependent variable that is divided into accounting and market measures. The proxy for accounting measure is return on asset and proxy for market measure is Tobin’s Q. This study employs univariate and balanced panel data analysis. For robustness of the analysis random-effects GLS regression is carried out. The empirical results show that that Family Firms outperform Non-Family Firms both in terms of accounting and market measures. In the later part family CEOs firms outperform the firms that have either insider or outsider non-family CEOs. This superior performance is subjected to the positive and statistically significant association between family ownership, management, and financial performance.