The Debt Agency Costs of Family Ownership: Firm Level Evidence on Small and Micro Firms
17 Pages Posted: 31 Aug 2007 Last revised: 4 Mar 2011
Date Written: August 30, 2007
Abstract
This study investigates the impact that family ownership has on loan availability and credit terms. Our study differs from existing literature by investigating the impacts of family ownership on loan availability and credit terms in a sample of small and micro Finnish firms. Our results suggest that loan availability becomes weaker when family ownership increases. Collateral requirements increase with management ownership, but contrary to previous studies on large, listed firms we find no effect on interest rates. These results suggest that there are agency costs involved with family ownership and that banks take this into account when lending to these firms. We also find that the impact of other attributes that affect loan availability of credit terms is different for family firms as opposed to non-family firms. Our results suggest that an increase in firm age improves loan availability and reduces collateral requirements only for the non-family firms. We also find that while an increase in profitability improves loan availability for all firms, it reduces interest rates and collateral requirements only for family firms. The results on relationship lending effects suggest that there are no differences in non-family and family firms. When it comes to bank market concentration, it seems that an increase in the number of local banks improves loan availability only for the non-family firms.
Keywords: Small business borrowing, Agency costs, Family ownership, loan availability, credit terms
JEL Classification: G3
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
A Survey of Corporate Governance
By Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny
-
The Separation of Ownership and Control in East Asian Corporations
By Stijn Claessens, Simeon Djankov, ...
-
One Share/One Vote and the Market for Corporate Control
By Sanford J. Grossman and Oliver Hart