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Ownership of firms and their impact on firm performance has been a topic of interest for long. Concentrated ownership of a firm in the hands of a family presents unique opportunities and challenges that may have an impact on the performance of the firm. Multiple studies have arrived at differing conclusions with regards to performance of family firms. Using a unique proprietary database of scientifically classified listed family and non-family firms this paper studies the impact of family ownership, control and management on firm performance through the lens of external and internal context. It thus advances the debate that has so far been skewed towards studies from the developed markets, larger firms and micro analysis. Using accounting and market measures of firm performance, we conduct a time-series cross-sectional comparison of family and non-family firms. Our analyses consistently reveal that family firms performed poorly in comparison to non-family firms in India. We also find that the impact of family does not weaken over time and that family management results in poorer performance. We, therefore, conclude that family ownership, control and managementm per se are a significant impediment to firm performance in emerging markets contexts like India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging markets witness a significant overlap between social communities, families and business activities. This paper attempts to decipher a source of heterogeneity, which is business group affiliation among family firms. This paper details the reasons why business group affiliation is beneficial in an emerging market by employing the concept of parenting to reconcile the potential deficiencies of business group affiliation pointed out by various strategy scholars. We use two proxies to measure the extent of parenting namely, firm leadership by a family member and promoting family's shareholding in the group affiliate company. The study has been conducted in the Indian economic context using a dataset consisting of 3,728 listed companies. Results show that superior parenting realized by professional firm leadership and higher promoter shareholding leads to superior financial performance among family business group firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]