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Socioemotional wealth (SEW) preservation is likely to be a key determinant for family firms when shaping their dividend policy. This paper analyzes how family-centered goals reflected by SEW can influence dividend policy in private family firms and explores how family involvement in management, generational stage, and firm hazard might moderate these relationships. Results indicate a negative association between SEW preservation and both the likelihood of giving dividends and the amount of dividend paid. This negative relationship is stronger when the CEO is a family member, in early generational stages and when the firm faces greater performance hazard. The amount of dividend paid is also lower when there are family members in other top management positions apart from the CEO. The evidence provided thus suggests that the existing heterogeneity in dividend policy in privately held family firms is strongly driven by differences in SEW priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on agency and behavioral perspectives, we disentangle two critical determinants of innovation strategies among family firms, namely, the family's wealth concentration (WC) in its business and the family's emphasis on family-centered goals (FCGs). Our results from a survey of Australian family firms show opposite and completely independent effects of WC and family-centered noneconomic goals on family firms' innovation strategies. While higher WC is negatively associated with firm innovation, a greater emphasis placed on family-centered noneconomic goals has a positive impact, which seems to be the key determinant of innovation strategies in family firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of both family-centered goals and family board representation (family member representation on the board of directors) on family firm capital structure. Based on a sample of 327 Belgian family SMEs, our findings show that family-centered goals indirectly affect the total debt rate through family board representation. More specifically, the results indicate that this mediating effect holds primarily for the short-term (vs. long-term) debt rate and for the financial (vs. nonfinancial) debt rate. Taken together, our findings suggest that the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective is relevant and fruitful to explain debt decisions in family firms. Our findings contribute to family business literature and enable scholars and practitioners to gain a better understanding of family firm capital structure decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]