CEOs and the family firm

Do family CEOs work harder? The answer seems to be no.

A new paper out in The Review of Financial Studies (31(5) 2018: 1605–53) looks at:

Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work
Oriana Bandiera, Renata Lemos, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

We build a comparable and bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply for 1,114 CEOs and investigate whether family and professional CEOs differ along this dimension. Family CEOs work 9% fewer hours relative to professional CEOs. CEO hours worked are positively correlated with firm performance and account for 18% of the performance gap between family and professional CEOs. We study the sources of the differences in labor supply across family and professional CEOs by exploiting firm and industry heterogeneity and variation in meteorological and sports events. Evidence suggests that family CEOs value or can pursue leisure activities more so than professional CEOs

Makes sense to me. One reason for founding and running a family firm would be the flexibility it gives to pursue things other than work. Even if this comes at a financial cost.