Thomas Zellweger

Succession is the most prominent topic in family business research and the succession path that a family chooses will likely impact the future performance of the business. Yet surprisingly little is known about succession paths⸻the sequence, pace, and rhythm with which management, board, and ownership is transitioned from one generation to the next. Using an inductive, theory-building approach based on sequence analysis and evidence from succession paths in 142 public family firms in the US, we address this gap. Our study reveals nine distinct succession paths with five distinct sequences of how management, board, and ownership transitions are structured over time. These sequences not only vary in their pace and rhythm, but also in their performance consequences. Specifically, we find that family firms with fast-paced succession paths and those with slow-paced, rhythmic succession paths outperform those with irregular rhythms. Further, early-ownership transitions benefit firm performance. Establishing succession paths as a meaningful new concept in family business research, this study not only advances our understanding of the succession phenomenon but also extends our theoretical insights into temporal processes in family firm successions.

We investigate the impact of CEO divorce on firm performance and examine how this relationship depends on the CEO’s life stage and the involvement of the CEO’s family in the firm. Using data from Statistics Sweden covering the period from 2004 to 2014, we tested our hypotheses using a difference-in-difference design on a matched sample of 2,336 firms, most of which are small firms. With our results we contribute to upper echelons theory by showing that CEO divorce negatively affects firm performance, and that this relationship strongly depends on the length of the marriage, the presence of children, as well as whether the CEO’s spouse and children work in the firm. We show that under certain conditions CEO divorce can even have a positive impact on firm performance, in particular in the presence of CEO’s children in the firm.

Estate taxes on business inheritance are regularly the subject of controversial debates in business, politics and economics. However, a holistic understanding and systematic analysis of what shapes cross-national differences in estate taxes is missing. Using data from 54 countries, we present a comprehensive configurational analysis of socio-economic determinants of estate taxes. We reveal six distinct configurations of country-level entrepreneurial activity, business ownership, wealth inequality as well as cultural orientation towards individualism and the long term, which explain the presence of high or low estate taxes, and theorize around the institutional principles upon which societies draw to justify these estate taxes. Our analysis also highlights the importance of treating low and high estate taxes as separate outcomes since, for example, a country’s entrepreneurial activity is less relevant than business ownership in configurations for high estate taxes, while the opposite is true for configurations for low estate taxes. Our study contributes a more nuanced understanding of the drivers of international variation in estate taxes and the particular role of entrepreneurs and business owners therein.