The Determinants of the CEO Successor Choice in Family Firms

The Determinants of the CEO Successor Choice in Family Firms

Iram Fatima Ansari, Marc Goergen, Svetlana Mira

Series number :

Serial Number: 
406/2014

Date posted :

January 01 2014

Last revised :

January 31 2014
SSRN Share

Keywords

  • family firms • 
  • CEO succession • 
  • Corporate governance • 
  • corporate control and ownership
This paper studies the factors that influence the CEO succession decision in family firms whose incumbent CEO is a member of the controlling family. The sample includes all such firms from France, Germany and the UK. We propose a new measure of directors? independence, which adjusts for various links with the controlling family. While we find that conventionally defined directors?
independence has no impact on the CEO succession decision, our corrected measure reduces the likelihood of the successor being another family member. There is also evidence that firms from France that are cross-listed in the UK or USA are less likely to appoint another family CEO.
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Authors

Real name: 
Iram Fatima Ansari
Real name: 
Svetlana Mira