Private capital & investment governance · Original source
Hans Peter Schmitz; George E. Mitchell; Elena M. McCollim
This study investigates a discourse about billionaire philanthropy established in letters submitted by 187 of 209 signatories of the Giving Pledge. The philanthropy of the wealthy is gaining increasing public attention and is subject to growing criticism, which demands additional study of how the wealthy collectively explain their generosity. The mixed-method analysis finds a strong emphasis on education and health causes and identifies two distinct and coherent rationales for being generous. The majority of letters express a social–normative rationale, consisting of two prevailing explanations: an expressed gratitude and desire to “give back” (1) and references to family upbringing as a socializing force (2). A minority of letters articulate a personal–consequentialist rationale, highlighting three separate explanations: a large inheritance may harm offspring (1), giving as personal gratification (2), and an acknowledgment of excess wealth with no better use (3). An expressed desire to have impact and make a difference appears in both rationales. The overall dominance of a social–normative rationale projects a discourse emphasizing benevolence as well as a narrative in which billionaires are an exceptionally productive and grateful subset of society. While previous studies have primarily focused on identifying individual psychological motives, this study shows how the Giving Pledge letters reflect a philanthropic discourse among the wealthy going back to Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth .
Private capital & investment governance · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Public statements about generosity communicate identity and purpose, but they do not by themselves establish that resources were transferred or that social outcomes improved. Building on Schmitz, Mitchell and McCollim’s analysis of 187 Giving Pledge letters, this companion proposes an accountability ledger connecting a family’s explanation for giving to authorization, funding, delivery and evidence. The process preserves the legitimacy of multiple motivations while preventing aspirational language from being presented as completed impact. It is an original editorial design for testing, not a finding about individual pledgers.
Private capital & investment governance · Original source
Aneesh Raghunandan; Shiva Rajgopal
Investment funds that claim to focus on socially responsible stocks have proliferated in recent times. In this paper, we verify whether ESG mutual funds actually invest in firms that have stakeholder-friendly track records. Using a comprehensive sample of self-labelled ESG mutual funds (as identified by Morningstar) in the United States from 2010 to 2018, we find that these funds hold portfolio firms with worse track records for compliance with labor and environmental laws, relative to portfolio firms held by non-ESG funds managed by the same financial institutions in the same years. Relative to other funds offered by the same asset managers in the same years, ESG funds hold stocks that are more likely to voluntarily disclose carbon emissions performance but also stocks with higher carbon emissions per unit of revenue. Despite these findings, ESG funds hold portfolio firms with higher average ESG scores. We show that ESG scores are correlated with the quantity of voluntary ESG-related disclosures but not with firms’ compliance records or actual levels of carbon emissions. Finally, ESG funds appear to underperform financially relative to other funds within the same asset manager and year, and to charge higher fees. Our findings suggest that socially responsible funds do not appear to follow through on proclamations of concerns for stakeholders.
Private capital & investment governance · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Raghunandan and Rajgopal’s study of US ESG mutual funds shows why a family office should examine a manager’s claims, holdings and observable conduct separately. This companion develops a mandate-verification process that compares promised objectives with portfolio evidence, distinguishes disclosure from performance, and records the costs and limitations of assurance. It does not conclude that every ESG strategy is ineffective or recommend particular investments. The proposed controls translate findings from a historical mutual-fund sample into questions that a family office can test in its own manager oversight.
Private capital & investment governance · Original source
Pontus Braunerhjelm; Arvid Malm; Johanna Palmberg; Per Thulin
Interest in philanthropy has witnessed a resurgence in recent decades, paralleled by a steep increase in the creation of individual fortunes. Originally being a more conspicuous phenomenon in Anglo-Saxon countries, philanthropy has become increasingly salient in traditional welfare states. However, the economic implications of philanthropy basically remain unknown. Here, we examine whether donations to research at higher education institutes (HEIs) in Sweden affect their knowledge output, as reflected in scientific publications and patent applications. The analysis is confined to the STEM-disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) for the period 2001 to 2015. We have access to data on the respective HEIs’ total research funding for STEM divided into donations, corporations, public block grants, and other public sources. In the analysis, we compare the effects of different research funding on knowledge output relative to their base funding. Implementing numerous controls, we find that patent applications are positively associated with a higher regional share of donations, whereas no such effects are detected for scientific publications. This is indicative of philanthropy being positively related to growth, since contemporary microeconomic models assign a critical role to innovation in promoting growth and societal prosperity.
Private capital & investment governance · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Philanthropic research funding should be evaluated through a chain of claims that distinguishes a grant, research outputs, knowledge use and broader social effects. Braunerhjelm and colleagues examine Swedish STEM funding, publications and regional patent applications from 2001–2015, finding associations that vary with the outcome and funding denominator. This companion proposes a grant evidence plan that records those distinctions, protects research independence and tests whether funding complements existing resources. It is a proposed governance design, not an estimate of the return or societal impact of any family’s grant.
Real estate & resilience · Original source
Tom Gillespie; Ronan C. Lyons; Thomas K. J. McDermott
Flood risk is a highly pervasive and costly natural hazard globally. With significant increases in flood risk expected over coming decades, future exposure to flood risk and associated costs will depend heavily on how private consumption decisions respond to new information about risk. We exploit a one-off national information treatment in the form of the release in 2011, for the first time, of detailed flood risk maps for Ireland, to test the effect of new information about flood risk on housing prices across a national housing market. We combine rich dwelling-level information on over 475,000 dwellings for the period 2006-2015 with detailed official data relating to flood risk, events and defences. Our core finding is that information matters. The price of housing responded clearly to the release of flood risk maps at the end of 2011, with the emergence of a 4% price discount for dwellings at risk of flooding.
Real estate & resilience · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Flood exposure and the market recognition of that exposure are separate risks. Gillespie, Lyons and McDermott study the release of Irish flood maps in 2011 and estimate a persistent price discount for exposed housing. This companion translates their identification strategy and limitations into a proposed family-office process: retain dated hazard information, separate physical loss from repricing, challenge appraisals, and prepare for disclosure changes before a transaction. It does not recommend a universal valuation haircut or claim that the proposed process has been empirically validated.
Governance & succession · Original source
Claudia Keser; Hartmut Kliemt; Maximilian Späth
We investigate how different levels of information influence the allocation decisions of donors who are entitled to freely distribute a fixed monetary endowment between themselves and a charitable organization in both giving and taking frames. Participants donate significantly higher amounts, when the decision is described as taking rather than giving. This framing effect becomes smaller if more information about the charity is provided.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A practical, source-specific protocol translating a student laboratory study of charitable framing into an information-first grant review. It separates factual comprehension, genuine choice and fundraising outcomes, assigns accountable owners, and specifies records and stopping rules. The proposed family-office process has not been empirically evaluated.
Governance & succession · Original source
Miguel Costa-Gomes; Philipp Schoenegger
Charities differ, among other things, alongside the likelihood that their interventions succeed and produce the desired outcomes and alongside the extent that such likelihood can even be articulated numerically. In this paper, we investigate what best explains charitable giving behaviour regarding charities that have interventions that will succeed with a quantifiable and high probability (sure-thing charities) and charities that have interventions that only have a small and hard to quantify probability of bringing about the desired end (probabilistic charities). We study individual differences in risk/ambiguity attitudes, empathy, numeracy, optimism, and donor type (warm glow vs. pure altruistic donor type) as potential predictors of this choice. We conduct a money incentivised, pre-registered experiment on Prolific on a representative UK sample (n = 1,506) to investigate participant choices (i) between these two types of charities and (ii) about one randomly selected charity. Overall, we find little to no evidence that individual differences predict choices regarding decisions about sure-thing and probabilistic charities, with the exception that a purely altruistic donor type predicts donations to probabilistic charities when participants were presented with a randomly selected charity in (ii). Conducting exploratory equivalence tests, we find that the data provide robust evidence in favour of the absence of an effect (or a negligibly small effect) where we fail to reject the null. This is corroborated by exploratory Bayesian analyses. We take this paper to be contributing to the literature on charitable giving via this comprehensive null-result in pursuit of contributing to a cumulative science.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
Research on small-stakes charitable decisions offers a useful restraint on family-office philanthropy: a conventional financial risk profile is not an established predictor of preference for uncertain charitable interventions. Drawing on Costa-Gomes and Schoenegger’s experiment, this AI-assisted editorial analysis proposes a grant-review process that separates donor intentions, intervention uncertainty, and organizational execution. It uses independent project assessment, explicit loss tolerances, staged learning and documented stop conditions. The proposed process has not itself been tested and does not prescribe an optimal grant allocation.
Governance & succession · Original source
Cláudia Custódio; Stephan Siegel
We investigate the link between birth order and the career outcome of becoming Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a company. CEOs are more likely to be the first-born, i.e., oldest, child of their family relative to what one would expect if birth order did not matter for career outcomes. Both male and female CEOs are more likely to be first-born. However, the first-born advantage seems to largely reflect the absence of an older brother, but not of an older sister. These results are more pronounced for family firms, where traditionally the oldest child is appointed to run the family business, but also hold for non-family firms.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A practical succession protocol inspired by observational research on CEO birth order. It separates ownership from management, audits access to development, precommits role criteria, and documents decisions without using birth order or gender as proxies for ability. The source studies CEOs, not family offices, and does not test this protocol.
Governance & succession · Original source
Ashley V. Whillans; Elizabeth W. Dunn
Recent research suggests that affluent individuals adopt agentic self-concepts, striving to stand out from others and to master the environment on their own. The present study provides a road test of this idea, showing that this theorizing can be utilized to increase charitable giving among the affluent, when individuals do not realize that their behavior is being studied. In a naturalistic field experiment conducted as part of an annual fundraising campaign (N = 12,316), we randomly assigned individuals from an affluent sample to view messages focused on agency (vs. communion). Messages that focused on personal agency (vs. communion) increased the total amount of money that individuals in the sample donated by approximately 82%. These findings provide evidence for a simple, theoretically-grounded method of encouraging donations among those with the greatest capacity to give.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A proposed protocol for family philanthropy that separates persuasive appeals from grant diligence and tests truthful communication against complete campaign outcomes. Based on a randomized alumni fundraising study, it preserves the distinction between donation size, participation and beneficiary impact, with explicit transfer limits.
Intelligence, trust & financial decisions · Original source
Daniela Sele; Marina Chugunova
Automated decision-making gains traction, prompting discussions on regulation with calls for human oversight. Understanding how human involvement affects the acceptance of algorithmic recommendations and the accuracy of resulting decisions is vital. In an online experiment (N = 292), for a prediction task, participants choose a recommendation stemming either from an algorithm or another participant. In a between-subject design, we varied if the prediction was delegated completely or if the recommendation could be adjusted. 66% of times, participants preferred to delegate the decision to an algorithm over an equally accurate human. The preference for an algorithm increased by 7 percentage points if participants could monitor and adjust the recommendations. Participants followed algorithmic recommendations more closely. Importantly, they were less likely to intervene with the least accurate recommendations. Hence, in our experiment the human-in-the-loop design increases the uptake but decreases the accuracy of the decisions.
Intelligence, trust & financial decisions · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
A proposed governance protocol for measuring whether human review improves an automated workflow. Drawing on an experiment in educational performance prediction, it separates adoption, confidence, correction activity and decision quality. The source did not study family offices or investment performance.
Governance & succession · Original source
Xiaodong Yu; Shize Sun; Xirong Cheng; Yize Lin; Huan Li
Existing studies have suggested that nonfamily CEOs are more likely to be fired from family firms, while we focus on why family CEOs are also fired from family firms. Using data from 455 listed Chinese family firms, we find that family CEOs with affinity ties are more likely to be dismissed as they are not genetically related to the family. The difference becomes greater when firm performance is poor or family ownership is high. These findings elaborate that business-owing family is not a group with aligned interests, that is, family members with different family identities are treated differently within family. Besides, existing studies have emphasized that the preservation of socioemotional wealth in family firms can affect firms’ operations, while this study further proposes that the preservation of socioemotional wealth can also have an impact on the business-owning families themselves.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
AI-assisted editorial analysis of Yu and colleagues’ study of CEO dismissals in Chinese listed family firms. This companion proposes an auditable retention and succession process for family-controlled operating assets, with role-based standards, independent challenge and explicit limits on transferring the evidence to family offices. These procedures are editorial proposals, not interventions tested in the source.
Governance & succession · Original source
Lixin Zhou; Hanwei Zhou; Xiao Wei
Currently, there is a lack of research specifically investigating the influence of internationalization on the innovation of family firms. This paper aims to investigate the influence of both internationalization depth and breadth on the innovation of family firms. Additionally, it aims to analyze how socioemotional wealth (SEW) and regional institutional environment in the home country influence this relationship. To test the hypotheses, a questionnaire survey was carried out with a sample of 253 family firms situated in eight provinces or municipalities in China. The results are as follows: First, internationalization depth negatively influenced family firm innovation, whereas internationalization breadth positively influenced family firm innovation. Second, the negative influence of internationalization depth on innovation was pronounced at a high level of family control, whereas the positive influence of internationalization breadth on innovation was pronounced at a low level of transgenerational succession intention in family firms. Third, a well-developed institutional environment strengthened the relationship between internationalization and innovation in family firms. This research enriches the literature on internationalization and innovation in family firms, and offers useful insights for practitioners.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
AI-assisted editorial analysis translating Internationalization of family firms on innovation: Moderating impact of socioemotional wealth and institutional environment into proposed governance actions for family-controlled operating assets. The underlying research studies adjacent populations; the procedures have not been evaluated in a new study.
Governance & succession · Original source
Jiarong Huang; Lixin Zhou; Shuai Song; Hanwei Zhou
Green innovation is essential for sustainable development, especially in China’s Specialized-Refined-Differentiated-Innovative (SRDI) enterprises. Family-owned SRDI firms, in particular, have attracted attention due to their de-familization strategies and their influence on green innovation. Our study analyzes panel data from 2016 to 2021 for listed SRDI family firms to investigate how de-familization in management rights and ownership impacts green innovation. Using socio-emotional wealth (SEW) theory and a fixed-effects model, we find that de-familization significantly negatively affects green innovation, with corporate governance serving as a mediating factor. Digital transformation moderates these negative effects, while market concentration exacerbates them. These impacts are more pronounced in firms before being designated as "Little Giants," those receiving higher government subsidies, those located in eastern regions, or those not classified as major polluters. This research provides actionable insights for SRDI family firms to strategically manage de-familization, optimize resource allocation, implement customized governance strategies, and promote sustainable growth.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
AI-assisted editorial analysis translating The impact of de-familization on green innovation: Evidence from SRDI family firms in China into proposed governance actions for family-controlled operating assets. The underlying research studies adjacent populations; the procedures have not been evaluated in a new study.
Governance & succession · Original source
Ya Qi; Ying Zou; Fuan Shi
Social capital plays a crucial role in resource integration within Chinese family businesses. This research investigates the relationship between CEO social capital and the implied cost of capital, while also considering the influence of CEO type on this relationship. The empirical results based on China’s A-share family-listed companies show that CEO social capital helps to reduce the implied capital cost of family business. However, compared with non-family CEO, the effect of family CEO social capital on reducing the implied cost of capital is weaker. The mechanism analysis confirms that CEO social capital reduces the implied cost of capital through reducing corporate risk and improving information transparency. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that CEO social capital significantly reduces the implicit cost of capital only in entrepreneurial families, companies with low family control, and those without intergenerational transmission. Additionally, the effect of CEO social capital is more pronounced in fiercely competitive markets and high-tech industries. When economic policy uncertainty is high and investor legal protections are weak, CEO social capital can better exert its complementary effect on formal institutions. These findings not only provide a theoretical foundation for leveraging the informal system of social capital to strengthen family governance but also offer practical insights for addressing the classic decision of whether to choose family succession or hire professional managers.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
AI-assisted editorial analysis translating CEO social capital and implied cost of capital: Based on the empirical evidence of Chinese family businesses into proposed governance actions for family-controlled operating assets. The underlying research studies adjacent populations; the procedures have not been evaluated in a new study.
Governance & succession · Original source
Andreas Raff; Robert Böhm; Christoph Fuchs
Charitable donations are often the most suitable available way to incentivize study participation, yet their optimal design remains unclear. In a preregistered field experiment, we invited 6,711 psychology faculty at top-200 universities to complete a survey in exchange for a US $5 donation to test whether allowing prospective participants to earmark the donation for a specific purpose increases study participation. Contrary to preregistered hypotheses derived from previous literature, the results showed no significant increase in study participation rates when participants could earmark their donation compared to a random allocation of funds. These findings suggest that while earmarking has been shown to enhance overall donation rates, its effectiveness may not extend to incentivizing study participation.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
AI-assisted editorial analysis translating a preregistered null-result field experiment into a bounded protocol for family-foundation participation incentives. Separates donor choice, respondent completion and grant restrictions; proposes cost records, test definitions and explicit stopping conditions without claiming a tested family-office intervention.
Governance & succession · Original source
Yanbo Liu; Hanzhou Liu; Decai Tang; Chenxi Yin; Lin Kong
This study examines family firms listed on China’s A-share market, using a two-way fixed effects model to explore the impact of ownership succession on debt financing and the moderating role of the institutional environment. The findings indicate that second-generation ownership succession reduces risk-taking, which in turn lowers debt financing. Additionally, the institutional environment mitigates the negative relationship between second-generation ownership succession, risk-taking, and debt financing. Further analysis reveals that factors such as the development of the non-state-owned economy, the maturity of factor markets, and advancements in market intermediaries and legal systems significantly moderate these relationships. This study broadens the research perspective on intergenerational succession in family businesses and offers empirical insights to help family firms adapt to regional institutional differences more effectively.
Governance & succession · Solutions companion
Family Office Private Wealth Journal · Editorial research desk
AI-assisted editorial analysis using a Chinese family-firm study to separate ownership transfer, financing demand, lender supply and short-term debt exposure. Proposed controls include authority mapping, maturity records and explicit stopping conditions; they are not evaluated family-office interventions.