Essays on Incentives in Family Firms

Download or read book Essays on Incentives in Family Firms written by Yanren Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of one literature review and three self-contained essays that discuss management transfers, work incentives and age structures in family firms. In the literature review, I summarize and structure recent studies on management transfer in family firms. The first essay focuses on the incentive effects of age structure in a single firm, and argues that compressed age structures are negatively related to firm performance, which provides a mechanism that causes the underperformance of dynastic management. In the second essay, I extend the single-firm analysis to a multi-firm scenario and find children prefer to work for their own family if the age gap between levels is large. Otherwise, they leave and work for other families. As a result, increased life expectancy leads to the separation between ownership and management, and family-managed firms have more compressed age structures than their professionally managed counterparts. In the third and final essay, I study the issue of self-enforcement in promotion tournaments and find organizations using rank-order contracts may still act opportunistically even when there exists no agency problem between owners and managers. Furthermore, both the wage-seniority profile and governance structure determine the credibility of rank-order contracts, which provides an alternative rationale for returns to seniority and underperformance of dynastic management.