Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper investigates how important sources of heterogeneity shape the way in which family firms (FFs) enter foreign markets. By integrating insights from International Business and Family Business literature, we claim that the interplay between the generation ruling the firm and the presence of non-family board members direct the choice between a greenfield investment vs. the acquisition of a local unit.

What has been the dynamics of productivity in the Italian business firms in the aftermath of the crisis? And what has been the impact of training efforts upon such dynamics? In this work, we address these questions exploring a unique Italian micro-level dataset which links information on the amount and the nature of training and firm balance-sheet data. First, we document what we call a neodualist tendency with a leader-laggard dynamics entailing a widening support of the productivity distributions.