Students on Summer Project Team:
Alaina Brotman '21, Marketing / Finance
Jon Geslani '21, Finance
James Lamphier '21, Finance / Civil Engineering
Hannah Moss '23, Economics / Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Jesus Salas, Associate Professor, Finance

Project Video: Click here to view

Project description:
Under the direction of Associate Professor of Finance Jesus Salas, the Lehigh Martindale Center’s Family Business Institute is amassing the largest database available in the world on publicly traded family firms. The long-term goal is to understand issues related to the operations, management, governance, control, and ownership of family firms and how and why their performance differs relative to other businesses. The database will serve years (possibly decades) of faculty and student research projects. The Summer 2020 Data for Impact team has collected and analyzed select data on publicly-traded family firms, thereby contributing to the larger database. Students have also tackled independent questions related to how and why the performance of family firms differs from non-family firms and contributed to research publications at the frontiers of the field. In particular, the team explored an emerging puzzle about the differences in financial performance, governance, and control between family firms that appear to be driven by entrepreneurial “exit” strategies targeting sale or acquisition vs those aiming for long-term continued control by the founders’ families. Understanding these differences, and identifying potential indicators for outside investors of these different strategies, could have important implications for investors, management, and boards of directors of such firms.