Agency Problems in Large Family Business Groups

Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2003, vol. 27, issue 4, 367-382

Abstract: Greater managerial ownership in family firms need not mitigate agency problems, especially when each family controls a group of publicly traded and private firms, as is the case in most countries. Such structures give rise to their own set of agency problems, as managers act for the controlling family, but not for shareholders in general. For example, to avoid what we call “creative self–destruction,†a family might quash innovation in one firm to protect its obsolete investment in another. At present, we do not know whether these agency problems are more or less serious impediments to general prosperity than those afflicting widely held firms.

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (282)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1540-8520.t01-1-00015 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:entthe:v:27:y:2003:i:4:p:367-382

DOI: 10.1111/1540-8520.t01-1-00015

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().