Le performance delle medie imprese familiari nei periodi di crisi: un'analisi empirica nel Centro Italia

This study aims at investigating the existing relation between family involvement and firm’s performances, with a specific reference to Italian unlisted medium-sized firms. After verifying the superiority in terms of performance of family firms compared to non-family firms, the study enquires if family ownership positively influences firm performance. Thereafter, with a specific reference to family businesses only, it analyses the existence of a positive relation between higher family involvement in governance and firm performance. For this purpose, a quantitative empirical research has been conducted on a sample of 386 private medium-sized firms located in centre Italy for the 2007-2014 period, obtaining a dataset of 3088 observations.The results obtained show that family firms experienced a superior performance than non-family firms. Besides, it was shown that family ownership itself does not influence, neither positively, nor negatively firm performance. It was also demonstrated that a higher involvement of the family in control positions (eg. CEO) results in higher profitability, while, on the contrary, a higher presence of family members within the board of directors seems to negatively influence firm performance. This study contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the relation between family and performance, focusing on the specific class of medium-sized firms, which is often considered and analyzed in the literature as part of the SMEs category.