EUFBC Seminar - Alexander Fries

The presenter is Alexander Fries, Doctoral Student at the Institute of Family Business and Mittelstand, WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, in Germany. The paper is entitled “Being innovative and talking about it: Innovation signaling in m&a announcements of family firms”. Nadine Kammerlander is a co-author of this paper.

November 25, 12:00-13:00 CET

Link: https://ju-se.zoom.us/j/68855796991

Abstract: Family firms have previously been found to be more efficient in creating innovation internally as compared to non-family firms because of their effective use of resources. Nevertheless, we do not sufficiently understand whether and how family firms signal their innovativeness towards the market to, e.g., enhance their reputation. We discuss this relationship in the context of M&A deal announcements of publicly listed firms. We hypothesize that true family firms mention more innovation in their deal announcements as compared to non-family firms while lone founder firms do so less. Moreover, we argue that being led by a family CEO strengthens this effect. We test our hypotheses based on a sample of 2,153 M&A deal announcements and find support for most of our hypotheses.