The Impact of Family Control on the Performance and Financial Characteristics of Family Versus Nonfamily Businesses in Japan: A Matched-Pair Investigation

Research on family businesses has undergone rapid development in the past two decades. Broadly speaking, such companies perform better than nonfamily businesses, as recent investigations in Japan support. To obtain a more precise result, this research has applied to the Japanese context a research methodology that has proven its worth in Western cases. On the basis of data covering the years 1998 and 2003, we found better perfor-mance among family businesses in Japan. Academic research explicitly recognizes the prevalence and better performance of family busi-nesses (FBs) around the world (e.g., Allouche &