Relationship between Governance, Performance and Solvency

The Italian manufacturing sector is largely made up of family businesses where the founder- entrepreneur is the main asset to guarantee success. The importance of these corporate categories has led many experts to study the characteristics of governance, especially from the perspective of agency theory. This work belongs to the typical studies that analyze the relationships between governance and economic-financial performance in family businesses, but it differs from the others because: 1) it analyzes a sample of small and medium-sized unlisted companies; 2) businesses are located in a region, Campania, which is suffering the economic crisis more than other regions. In particular, this research aims at demonstrating the critical importance of the resource represented by the founder-entrepreneur, both in terms of profit performance and in terms of solvency: at the time of succession it is therefore necessary that the power of command is given to a descendant who can make specific contributions to the process of value creation.