Publications

November 2015 (Revised October 2017)
Case

Dollar General Bids for Family Dollar

By: Jonas Heese, Paula A. Price, Suraj Srinivasan and David Lane

In spring 2015, Dollar General's CEO Rick Dreiling was looking ahead to retiring at year's end but worried about ensuring continued growth for the company he had built since 2008 into a market leader in the U.S. discount retail world. Dollar General operated over... View Details

Keywords: Dollar General; Family Dollar; Dollar Tree; Antitrust; Board Of Directors; Activist Investors; Federal Trade Commission; Acquisition; Valuation; Corporate Strategy; Retail Industry; United States

February 2024 (Revised June 2024)
Case

Can Families Conquer Private Equity? Pritzker Private Capital

By: Lauren Cohen and Sophia Pan

Anthony (Tony) Pritkzer, Paul Carbone, and the Pritzker Private Capital (PPC) team wondered how to approach the firm’s next phase of growth. PPC was a private equity firm that offered a differentiated approach to the family capital market. Back in 2016, the partners... View Details

2010
Working Paper

The Role of Institutional Development in the Prevalence and Value of Family Firms

We investigate the role played by institutional development in the prevalence and value of family firms, while controlling for the potential effect of cultural norms. China provides a good research lab since it combines great heterogeneity in institutional development... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Data and Data Sets; Law; Management; Organizational Culture; Research; Value; China

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May 2006
Article

How Do Family Ownership, Control, and Management Affect Firm Value?

Keywords: Family Ownership; Business Ventures; Value

Find at Harvard

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Fast Answer

Family Offices and Family Trusts

How do I identify the investment firms that are family offices or family trusts servicing wealthy families? Preqin Click the "Search for" tab at the top of the... View Details

November 2016 (Revised April 2018)
Case

Darby's Investment in Sirma: Professionalizing an Entrepreneurial Firm

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Eren Kuzucu

In March 2010, Burak Dalgın (HBS MBA 2004) led private equity firm Darby's investment in Sırma, a local Turkish water and beverage company. Sırma was owned and managed by members of two Turkish business families. The existing management, while being highly... View Details

Keywords: Control Systems; Variance Analysis; Emerging Markets; Debt; Family Ownership; Turkey; Valuation; Business or Company Management; Private Equity; Financial Reporting; Investment; Budgets and Budgeting; Food and Beverage Industry; Turkey

October 2010
Background Note

Family Corporate Governance: A Brief Literature Review

By: Lena G. Goldberg and David Kiron

This note discusses competing theories of governance in family owned firms and focuses on agency theory, stewardship theory, and the sociological concept of embeddedness. View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Managerial Roles; Family Ownership; Theory

April 2025
Article

Corporate Ownership and ESG Performance

By: Belen Villalonga, Peter Tufano and Boya Wang

Using a sample of 3083 firms from 62 countries over 18 years, we analyze how the structure and identity of firms' material owners influence their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. We find that firms with founding families or other individual... View Details

Keywords: ESG; CSR; Family Firms; Social Responsibility; Environment; Sustainability; Ownership; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Governance; Environmental Sustainability

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17 Apr 2014
News

A Family Investment

Murat Özyeg in (MBA 2003) always knew that eventually he would join the Fiba Group, the investment firm he watched his father, Hüsnü Özyeg in (MBA 1969), build in the 1980s. He was also aware that education would be key to his ability to... View Details

01 Jun 1998
News

Simmons Family Endows Professorship

and make time for family life, believe in hard work, and support their communities. The family recently established a fund to create the Roy and Elizabeth Simmons Professorship of Business Administration at... View Details

23 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

The Gulf: It’s a Family Affair

struggled to get twenty-five people to the conference. At that conference the academics and consultants came together and created a professional society called the Family Firm Institute (FFI) to develop... View Details

Keywords: by Wendy Guild & Andrea Schulman

01 Mar 2010
News

Students Assist Needy Family

$1,550 for the family in less than 48 hours. “It was a truly rewarding and meaningful experience for both of us,” said Simmons. SmallCanBeBig.org, created by Boathouse Group, a Boston communications firm led... View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Religious, Grantmaking, Civic, Professional, and Similar Organizations; Personal Services

May 2018
Article

Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work

By: Oriana Bandiera, Renata Lemos, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and comparable fashion and to build a bottom-up measure... View Details

Keywords: Performance Productivity; Family Ownership; Management