Las finanzas de los negocios familiares: EL TAMAÑO SÍ IMPORTA.

There is not such a thing as "finance for family enterprises": financial crossroads and decisions of family enterprises do not differ from those at the rest of enterprises. The dimension that matters is size: enterprises of similar size share similar problems, regardless who are their owners. Probably, the principle that summarizes the financial dilemma of family enterprises is "to avoid that the cash needs on the enterprise could affect the life plans of the family and conversely" Generally, small and medium enterprises can not satisfy altogether the financial needs of all its affiliates; they tend to distribute few dividends and to pay its members with wages below the market in order to avoid to exhaust the enterprise's resources. The small and medium enterprises will have much more difficulties to overcome de excluding barriers to financial markets in comparison with the big enterprises, due to problems arising from asymmetric information. Therefore, the mix of financing sources through which they get resources are very different between big and small enterprises. Maybe, the most important response from financial markets to the problem of asymmetric information that hit small enterprises is microfinance and particularly microcredit. Opening capital to third parties is a good opportunity to raise funds and provide liquidity to shareholders' equity, to allow them to balance their portfolios or personal investment and make them less vulnerable to the family enterprise's performance. On the other hand, the lack of public scrutiny in many family enterprises can turn, in the long term, into the germ of their destruction, because they have nobody to question their strategies or to sound the alarm before new trends in the market or problems that can be embarrassing for the family. Regardless the size of the enterprises, they all have to build the best possible corporate government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]