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The study, by focusing on a context dominated by firms with a concentrated ownership, in which type-II agency problems (principal-principal conflicts) may occur, aims to depict which board configurations may be effective in protecting minority shareholders by mitigating the risk of controlling shareholders' expropriation via cash holdings.

The research adopts a configurational approach and empirically conducts a fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of 268 Italian listed companies.

The analysis depicts three combinations of board configurations and ownership structures that can be considered effective, namely Active Independent Control, Female Active Control and Double Internal Control.

The study revisits the topic of the risk of expropriation via cash holdings in a type-II agency problem framework and delineates the meaning of board effectiveness in a mature context ruled by family firms, like Italy. Furthermore, by drawing on a configurational approach, it overcomes the causality relationship between each board characteristic and cash holdings policies and reasons from a “bundle” perspective.

Investor relations is the communication of information relating to the company to the financial community; analysts, investors and potential investors. It is regarded as a relatively new phenomenon, which has developed most rapidly in the USA followed by the UK. Traditionally continental European companies have been viewed as more reliant on loan rather than equity funding. However the development of increasingly important equity markets throughout Europe has led to a growth in importance of the Investor Relations function. This paper examines the importance of the investor relations function within the top 80 continental European companies by reporting on the result of a postal questionnaire. The results confirm that many continental European companies have well established investor relations practices and the function is growing in importance.

The heterogeneity of Family Firms (FFs) requires ‘traditional’ business practices such as Talent Management (TM) to be properly adapted before implementation. FFs are defined by the intention to retain family ownership and control across generations. This invites specific development and education of future business leaders. However, traditional TM practices become irrelevant in FF context and need to be refined. This chapter focuses on the role of different generations in FF results especially in international markets and considers how different generations influence TM in FFs.

The present paper aims at exploring effective business model adaptations in response to unexpected events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors test the effect of two major business model adaptations, namely changes in the value proposition and changes in the target market, on a sample of 96 family SMEs.

Results show that only changes in the value proposition had a positive and significant impact on performance, helping family SMEs to better confront COVID-19. However, this effect is reduced in the case of target market change.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how business model adaptations in family SMEs affect performance in crisis situations.