The Role of Going Public in Family Businesses' Long-Lasting Growth: A Study of Italian IPOs

Abstract

This research note investigates how going public affects the capacity of companies to pursue growth and profitability in the long run. It combines the results of transversal and longitudinal analyses of two databases of fast-growing Italian companies and IPOs and compares the results with nonfamilyowned businesses that went public during the same period. Studies of companies' growth show two main reasons for growth: external causes due to evolution in progress in the competitive environment and internal causes brought about by management ambitions. In either case, growth provides companies with three main advantages: the ability to increase value, higher market shares, and increased productivity. Italian empirical research shows the great difficulties that both small and large companies have growing. It is estimated that most companies, especially small ones, are family owned. The literature shows that family-owned companies face particular obstacles and that the IPO appears to provide them with some advantages.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 58 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.