A Note on Agency Conflicts and the Small Firm Investment Decision*

Morris G. Danielson and Jonathan A. Scott

Journal of Small Business Management, 2007, vol. 45, issue 1, 157-175

Abstract: This paper explains how agency conflicts—and potential agency conflicts—can influence the investment decisions of small firms, and provides evidence of these effects using data from a recent survey of small firm investment practices. The survey asks business owners to identify their most important investment concern—overinvestment or underinvestment. We find that underinvestment concerns are more prevalent in growing firms, and those with concentrated ownership and control structures. Overinvestment concerns increase as firms adopt less‐concentrated ownership and control structures. These results suggest that the management challenges facing small firms shift as the degree of separation between ownership and control becomes greater.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1540-627X.2007.00205.x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:ujbmxx:v:45:y:2007:i:1:p:157-175

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ujbm20

DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-627X.2007.00205.x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Small Business Management is currently edited by Eric Liguori

More articles in Journal of Small Business Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().