Survival and succession of ceos in Norwegian family firms

Abstract

In this paper, we place a magnifying glass above a special type of corporates in the Norwegian economy; the family firms. Specifically, we evaluate the CEO position and inspect factors affecting successions and tenure within these firms. We explore the Centre for Corporate Governance Research (CCGR) data over non-listed firms between year 2000 and 2015 and utilize the proceeding in our survival analysis to examine corporate governance in these complex entities. Using theories on family firms and econometric techniques we both present and discuss results provided by this empirical research. We find that ownership and family relations are the most important determinant of survivability of CEOs in Norwegian family firms. Our results show that family related CEOs survives longer than their counterparts. They consistently own a large fraction of the firms they manage, regardless of firm size. Moreover, indication of nepotism is also found in large firms as they tend to prefer family CEOs in most cases. We do however, not find evidence that large family firm CEOs have longer tenure compared to small family firm CEOs.