Best Paper Awards per il paper dal titolo “The use of stock option in family firms”

This paper investigates whether the family ownership affects the aim of stock option plans. Taking advantage of the Italian setting that is representative of a family business environment, we perform a cluster analysis based on the characteristics of plan design to disentangle the incentive from the non-incentive stock option plans. We assume that with increasing of family ownership the overlapping between family and business life exacerbates the agency problems between family and non-family members and posit that the use of pay incentives helps to mitigate these problems. Our logit model reveals that family firms are more likely to grant stock options to family members to align their interests to the ones of non-family owners, especially when a non-family CEO is in charge. This paper contributes to the existing literature on corporate governance in family business. Our results have also practical significance for investors, analysts and policy-makers.