Family Firms and Labor Relations

This paper examines the relationship between family ownership and the quality of labor relations. We find that family ownership is more prevalent in countries in which labor relations are hostile, consistent with the notion that family firms are particularly effective at coping with difficult labor relations. Our results are robust to controlling for minority shareholder protection and other potential determinants of family ownership. To address endogeneity issues, we show that, controlling for industry-and country-fixed effects, industries that are more labor dependent have relatively more family ownership in countries with worse labor relations.