Corporate Governance, Performance and CEO Turnover: A Comparative Study Between Family and Non-Family Brazilian Businesses

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing share of researches on Finance have placed attention to the study of corporate governance, highlighting its implications to the global performance of companies. One of the ways to assess the structures and practices of the corporate governance is to verify the sensibility of executives' turnover to the company performance. In this article we aim at checking if the determinants of executives' turnover in Brazilian companies may be different between family and non-family businesses from the governance viewpoint. The analysis is conducted having as reference a set of 176 industrial businesses listed at Bovespa, segmented by type (family or non-family), between 1997 and 2001. The contribution of this study is in the peculiarities involving the family businesses and which have not been considered in Brazilian researches, and by offering elements to reflect theoretically about the performance of family businesses and their governance structures. The results reveal the existence of significant differences in performance, value and structures of corporate governance between family and non-family businesses. It has also been observed that the companies which obtained better profitability tended to implement a smaller turnover.