Patient capital · co-investment & liquidity · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Family offices are frequently described as patient investors, yet a declared long horizon does not establish the ability to maintain an investment through changing financial and family circumstances. This critical synthesis proposes that patient capital depends on three jointly necessary capabilities: financing continuity, evidence-responsive judgment and legitimate decision authority. It examines conflicting findings on private-equity co-investment, research on fund cash-flow cyclicality and evidence of financing differences between single family offices and private-equity firms. The contribution is a decision framework that separates access, fee savings and investment skill while assessing exposures across the family balance sheet. The accompanying protocol specifies an opportunity register, stress scenarios and prospective evaluation. These are original editorial proposals, not a tested model or a claim of superior returns. The Napa conversation supplies questions and contrasting practitioner perspectives; it does not provide a verified performance dataset.
Patient capital · co-investment & liquidity · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
This proposed operating protocol helps a family office assess co-investments without confusing access with investment skill or a favorable mark with available cash. It produces six linked records: mandate, opportunity history, economic exposure, liquidity scenarios, independent challenge and monitoring decisions. A transparent hypothetical example demonstrates how commitments can exceed stressed cash capacity despite a large reported portfolio. The protocol includes a prospective evaluation plan with failure conditions. It has not been trialed and does not prescribe a portfolio allocation, a reserve percentage or an expected return. Its purpose is to make assumptions, obligations and decision authority inspectable before money is committed.
Deep tech · university science & investor judgment · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Scientific networks can introduce family offices to technologies before conventional investment markets can easily evaluate them. The same access can create dependence on a small circle of advocates, encourage premature valuation narratives and blur the distinction between a discovery and a commercially viable system. This article develops five separate evidence obligations: scientific validity, system readiness, customer demand, commercialization rights and security-specific economics. It synthesizes venture-capital survey research, quasi-experimental evidence on research grants, venture valuation research, network studies and institutional technology-transfer guidance. Its original contribution is to treat these obligations as distinct conditions rather than components of a compensating score. Capital is evaluated partly by the uncertainty it can resolve before a larger commitment becomes necessary. The framework is conceptual and unvalidated; it reports no new participant data, investment result or quantum-computing forecast.
Deep tech · university science & investor judgment · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
This companion converts five evidence obligations into a practical protocol for family offices considering scientific ventures or university-originated technology. It specifies a claim register, independent review, rights assessment, customer tests, security-level scenarios and milestone decisions. A hypothetical robotics example shows how to define a test that could change an investment decision without presenting an invented result. The proposed process treats the quality of evidence and the cost of obtaining it as governance questions. It has not been validated and does not provide individualized investment or legal advice. Its intended output is a reviewable decision packet, including reasons to defer or decline.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Original source
Kathy K. Overbeke; Diana Bilimoria; Toni Somers
Family businesses are critical to the United States economy, employing 63% of the workforce and generating 57% of GDP (University of Vermont, 2014). Family business continuity, however, remains elusive as approximately 70% of family businesses do not survive the second generation (Poza, 2013). In order to augment our understanding of how next generation leaders are chosen in family businesses, we examine daughter succession. Using a sample of pairs of family business fathers and daughters and drawing on an earlier study of the dearth of successor daughters in family businesses (Overbeke et al., 2013), we reveal that shared vision between fathers and daughters is central to daughter succession. Self-efficacy and gender norms influence shared vision and when fathers and daughters share a vision for the future of the company, daughters are likely to be transformed into successors.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A family office should be able to explain how a potential successor becomes eligible for meaningful authority. An unspoken assumption that a son will lead can exclude a daughter before her interests or skills are explored. Conversely, a declaration that all children are welcome does little when experience, information and sponsorship still flow to only one child. This protocol makes the path to consideration visible without assuming that any family member wants an operating role.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Original source
Manuel Feldmann; Martin Lukes; Lorraine Uhlaner
This study adapts a multi-level view of culture, including society- and family-based gender norms and the family embeddedness perspective, to predict the career status of a sample of 2897 young Europeans (aged 18–35) from 11 countries, with at least one self-employed parent. We find that gender identity is associated with career status such that a woman is more likely than a man to be an employee vs. a successor to a family firm but no less likely to be a founder as compared with either being an employee or successor. However, certain family and society-level culture variables combined with gender identity reverse these trends. A woman with caring responsibilities is more likely to be a successor than either a founder or employee. Also, while two-way interaction effects for traditional gender norms and having a self-employed mother are weak or not significant, the study finds that in combination, a woman reporting both traditional gender norms and having a self-employed mother is more likely to be a successor than being either an employee or a founder, reversing gender identity main effects. Incorporating the family embeddedness perspective and the role of culture in occupational choice, we develop a better view of the gender gap in entrepreneurship, finding that the family may serve as a stronger influence than society when implied norms of these two levels of culture clash. By examining actual rather than intended career choice, we also contribute to the occupational choice literature on youth employment.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A successor’s presence in the business can mean genuine ambition, attractive opportunity, limited alternatives or a response to care obligations. Counting participation alone cannot distinguish these pathways. For women in wealth leadership, a sound governance process should preserve the freedom to choose among operating leadership, ownership, entrepreneurship and an external career.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Original source
Angel L. Meroño-Cerdán
Female managers are more common in family firms largely due to women’s incorporation into management positions via succession. Nonetheless, extrinsic and intrinsic factors constrain to some extent the access and the outcomes of female managers as potential successors. This study aims to uncover the particular conditions under which women frequently have access to CEO positions in family firms. Using a database of 177 SME Spanish family firms and using cluster analysis based on TwoStep technique, women are found to be unexpected successors to a greater extent than male successors. Oftentimes, they are chosen as a last resort to cope with poor business performance and low family orientation. More than an opportunity, this unplanned access becomes a trap since it fails to comply with all the requirements of successful transmissions.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A crisis can create a leadership opening while simultaneously removing the conditions needed to succeed. A family member appointed after poor performance may inherit depleted liquidity, unresolved disputes and authority that exists only on paper. Recognition of a woman’s talent is therefore incomplete unless the appointment includes resources, decision rights and a fair account of the starting conditions.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Original source
Kyriakos Lingas
Economy, business, and entrepreneurship are related to the world of men. Home, nurturing, and the family belong to women's world, so the story goes. On the other hand, family entrepreneurship and its outcome, the family business, is probably the most traditional way of conducting business, being thus a universal phenomenon. However, in comparison to other economic and entrepreneurial activities, the field of family entrepreneurship has been only recently addressed by economists, researchers, and academicians. Family entrepreneurship as a field of inquiry is suffering the consequences of conceptual dualisms rendering ‘family’ and ‘business’, ‘kinship’ and ‘economy,’ ‘private,’ and ‘public’ as distinct social and economic spheres. To that extent, the topic lies at the ‘gray zones’ of scholarly inquiry, resisting clear-cut definitions and approaches.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Family enterprises often depend on work that is not reflected in job titles: maintaining customer relationships, coordinating family decisions, mediating disputes or preserving institutional knowledge. When such work is treated as a natural family obligation, its performer may receive neither compensation nor a route to authority. The purpose of this audit is to make contributions inspectable without converting every family relationship into an employment transaction.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Original source
Lisa K. Gundry; Jill R. Kickul; Tatiana Iakovleva; Alan L. Carsrud
This research presents an examination of familial influence on strategic entrepreneurial behaviors within a transitional economic context. Utilizing a large sample of women-led family businesses, the study investigates the relationships between risk-taking propensity, entrepreneurial intensity, and opportunity recognition of the entrepreneur and the innovative orientation of the firm and sustainability. A model of the influences on innovativeness and sustainability in family firms is developed, and the potential contribution of the present study is the identification of constructs that facilitate these strategic outcomes and behaviors that drive growth. The degree to which family firms can create new products, services, and processes that add value to their marketplace can strongly influence their sustainability, especially in an emerging economy.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Telling women owners to be more entrepreneurial is unhelpful when the enterprise does not provide time, information or authority to test an opportunity. A family office can offer a more useful service: a disciplined process that connects an owner’s insight to a bounded experiment and an explicit investment decision. The proposed ledger separates opportunity recognition from approval, and approval from evidence of commercial value.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Original source
Huiping Xian; Nan Jiang; Maura McAdam
This article explores the approaches of identity construction used by Chinese daughters while negotiating the successor–leader role within family businesses. A qualitative interpretivist approach was adopted to understand daughter views on gender, family business leadership and succession, as well as the approaches adopted to negotiate the role of female successor/leader in the Chinese family business. Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with both actual and potential female successors. Three approaches of identity construction emerged based on the degree of conformity to traditional gender roles and Confucian family values: first, to abide by conventional gender expectations and perceive themselves as a temporary leader; second, to act as the ‘second leader’ and remain involved in decision making and third, to challenge conventional gender roles and strive to be an independent leader. This article contributes to debates on women in family business and gendered identity construction of daughters in family business in the Chinese context.
Succession, legitimacy & leadership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A daughter may be named a leader while important decisions remain with a parent, brother or adviser. The gap between title and authority can remain hidden because formal documents show progress while everyday interactions preserve the old arrangement. A family office supporting succession should therefore inspect actual decision pathways alongside the organization chart.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Original source
Ana Beatriz Hernández-Lara; Juan Pablo Gonzales-Bustos; Amado Alarcón-Alarcón
There is growing institutional and social pressure for greater balance, parity, and equality at the highest levels of corporations. This is coupled with an increasing interest in analysing the effects of gender diversity on corporate boards. However, companies may only reap the benefits of gender diversity by achieving better qualified and more independent boards. This study aims to contribute to the open debate on the effects of board gender diversity on R&D, by taking into account the independence of female directors. Panel regression analyses were performed with data for 67 Spanish-listed companies during the 2003–2019 period. Our results confirm the positive effects of gender diversity on R&D. However, this positive influence is lower if female directors have family links with male members on the board. These findings have policy implications, regarding the need to increase gender equality in corporate boards for social and sustainability purposes, while the benefits are conditioned by the independence of female directors. The value of this research rests on the study of the effects, beyond the mere analysis of financial performance of the gender diversity of boards.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Gender representation is visible and easy to count. The ability to question assumptions, obtain information and influence a decision is harder to observe. For family-controlled enterprises, an effective board review should examine both. A director’s family relationship can create valuable knowledge and potential conflicts; neither her gender nor her surname alone establishes how independently she will act.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Original source
Emma García-Meca; Domingo J. Santana-Martín
Using a sample of 1134 firm-year observations of non-financial family firms listed on the Spanish stock market in the period 2003–2020, we explore how women directors affect company performance, distinguishing between family and non-family female members on the board. We believe there might be faultlines between family and non-family women on boards that may well impair performance due to differences in agency conflicts and socioemotional links with the family firm. As the number of female family directors grows, we reveal that conflicts with non-family sub-groups become more prevalent, impairing firm performance. Opening boards to non-family women does, however, seem to be an effective way of enhancing firm performance when there is a critical mass of female directors. The results are robust to alternative measures of board gender diversity and different econometric specifications.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Audit how formal board seats translate into usable authority, equal information access and substantive challenge across family affiliations.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Original source
Maximiliano González; Alexander Guzmán; Eduardo Pablo; María Andrea Trujillo
In this study, using a unique hand-collected sample of 523 closely held Colombian family firms and 5.094 firm-year observations, with 4907 board members, including 833 female board members, we show that female directors have a negative effect on firm performance. However, when we separate female directors into two groups, family female directors and outside female directors, we find that the latter has a positive and significant effect on firm performance. We further construct a human capital index after a detailed analysis of 15% of the total curriculum vitae of directors for those in our sample we were able to find. Although the subsample is not representative enough to make general claims for the whole sample due to data constraints, we shed some light about a potential gender bias in the development of the human capital of heirs and the corresponding impact of different levels of directors’ education and experience on firms’ financial performance.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Create an equitable pathway from development opportunities to demonstrated director readiness before assigning responsibility.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Original source
Jan Luca Pletzer; Romina Nikolova; Karina Karolina Kedzior; Sven Constantin Voelpel
In recent years, there has been an ongoing, worldwide debate about the representation of females in companies. Our study aimed to meta-analytically investigate the controversial relationship between female representation on corporate boards and firm financial performance. Following a systematic literature search, data from 20 studies on 3097 companies published in peer-reviewed academic journals were included in the meta-analysis. On average, the boards consisted of eight members and female participation was low (mean 14%) in all studies. Half of the 20 studies were based on data from developing countries and 62% from higher income countries. According to the random-effects model, the overall mean weighted correlation between percentage of females on corporate boards and firm performance was small and non-significant (r = .01, 95% confidence interval: -.04, .07). Similar small effect sizes were observed when comparing studies based on developing vs. developed countries and higher vs. lower income countries. The mean board size was not related to the effect sizes in studies. These results indicate that the mere representation of females on corporate boards is not related to firm financial performance if other factors are not considered. We conclude our study with a discussion of its implications and limitations.
Citation: Pletzer JL, Nikolova R, Kedzior KK, Voelpel SC (2015) Does Gender Matter? Female Representation on Corporate Boards and Firm Financial Performance - A Meta-Analysis. PLoS ONE 10(6):
e0130005.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0130005
Academic Editor: Rodrigo Huerta-Quintanilla, Cinvestav-Merida, MEXICO
Received: February 3, 2015; Accepted: May 15, 2015; Published: June 18, 2015
Copyright: © 2015 Pletzer et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper (Table 2).
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Separate fair-access commitments from empirical performance claims and evaluate governance through observable mechanisms.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Original source
Pattanaporn Chatjuthamard; Pornsit Jiraporn; Sang Mook Lee
We investigate the effect of board gender diversity on managerial risk-taking incentives. Our results demonstrate that companies with stronger board gender diversity provide more powerful executive risk-taking incentives. It appears that female directors’ risk aversion exacerbates managers’ risk aversion, resulting in a sub-optimal level of risk-taking. To offset this tendency for too little risk, companies are induced to provide stronger risk-taking incentives. Specifically, an increase in board gender diversity by one standard deviation raises vega by 10.3%. Further analysis corroborates the results, including propensity score matching, entropy balancing, and an instrumental-variable analysis. Endogeneity appears to be unlikely, suggesting that female directors are not merely associated with, but probably bring about stronger risk-taking incentives.
Citation: Chatjuthamard P, Jiraporn P, Lee SM (2021) Does board gender diversity weaken or strengthen executive risk-taking incentives? PLoS ONE 16(10):
e0258163.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258163
Editor: Stefan Cristian Gherghina, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, ROMANIA
Received: June 4, 2021; Accepted: September 21, 2021; Published: October 11, 2021
Copyright: © 2021 Chatjuthamard et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: The data are available through the databases described in the paper. Anyone can access the data with a simple subscription to the database. For instance, our data on firm characteristics are from COMPUSTAT. Anyone with a subscription to COMPUSTAT would have access to the same data we did. COMPUSTAT is offered by S&P. So, one can contact S&P directly to request a subscription (https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/?product=compustat-research-insight). A subscription is also available through the Wharton Research Data Service (WRDS) (https://wrds-www.wharton.upenn.edu/). We do not have any special privileges beyond a simple subscription.
Funding: The research was funded by Chulalongkorn University under the Ratchadapisek Sompoch Endowment Fund through Center of Excellence (CE) in Management Research for Corporate Governance and Behavioral Finance and Sasin School of Management through SASIN Major Grant for a research program.The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Board authority & accountable ownership · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Inspect whether executive compensation, company risk and family capital exposure support the same strategy.
Access to private capital · Original source
Kevin Koziol; Maja Schmitz; Suleika Bort
A growing body of literature explores whether and why female and male entrepreneurs differ in their access to equity financing. This trend has led to an increasing fragmentation of the research field, as many studies analyze various mechanisms and focus on a certain form of equity financing. To advance research on gender differences in equity financing, it is necessary to identify patterns and inconsistent findings in the literature related to these mechanisms. Therefore, we perform a systematic literature review to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge on gender differences in the key forms of entrepreneurial equity financing (venture capital, angel investment, and equity crowdfunding). Based on 75 studies from 2001 to mid-2024, our review indicates that male entrepreneurs have an advantage in raising capital from venture capitalists and business angels, whereas female entrepreneurs are more successful in equity crowdfunding. These gender differences stem from a complex combination of mechanisms, which we categorize into four thematic dimensions that capture entrepreneurs’ characteristics, investors’ characteristics, the ventures’ characteristics and strategies, and contextual factors. We propose specific future research directions for each dimension, and discuss theoretical and methodological research opportunities that are applicable across dimensions to improve our understanding of gender differences in equity financing.
Access to private capital · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
An investment committee cannot responsibly translate a broad claim about a gender funding gap into a single allocation rule. Koziol, Schmitz and Bort review 75 studies spanning venture capital, business angels and equity crowdfunding. Their synthesis identifies differences across financing channels and multiple interacting mechanisms. For a family office, the practical opportunity is to build an evidence map that identifies where its own sourcing and selection process may exclude strong opportunities, while preserving the distinction between research findings and a proposed operational response.
Access to private capital · Original source
Barbara Orser; Susan Coleman; Yanhong Li
This paper examines the positioning of gender within women-focused capital funds (WFCFs) to consider the extent to which these digitally enabled sources of finance reflect the tenets of entrepreneurial feminism. Content analysis of 27 funds situated in Canada and the USA informs about fund mandates, rationales, types of capital, and anticipated outcomes. Our findings reveal that a minority of WFCFs examined sought to enhance equity and counter structural barriers associated with women entrepreneurs’ access to financial capital. Alternatively, the majority of WFCFs were positioned as vehicles to facilitate individual wealth creation. Eligibility ranged from multiple gender identities of the business owner to “women-led” businesses—defined as at least one woman executive, board or steering committee member. The latter of these criteria has the effect of diverting attention away from firms that are launched by women entrepreneurs. Pinkwashing was more likely to occur when WFCFs were created as add-ons to mainstream programs and services, rather than as a central element of the organization’s mission of supporting women and non-binary femmes. The findings support arguments that technology can both challenge or reinforce structural constraints that impede women entrepreneurs in the digital era.
Access to private capital · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Orser, Coleman and Li analyze the public positioning of 27 women-focused capital funds in Canada and the United States. Their findings distinguish approaches aimed at individual wealth creation from approaches addressing structural barriers. For a family office, the relevant question is whether a manager's marketing label corresponds to its actual mandate, allocation rules and distribution of authority. This companion proposes a due-diligence audit. It does not presume that every women-focused fund pursues the same objective or that one objective necessarily produces higher returns.