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The authors investigate the influence of CEOs’ Islamic religiosity on the level of tax aggressiveness within private family firms. In addition, this study aims to explore the moderating role of the CEO's ownership stake in the firm and the payment of Zakat.

The authors gathered data through surveys completed by 199 CEOs of Jordanian Islamic family firms. These survey results, along with financial statements, were used for multiple ordinary least squares regression analyses.

The results of this study reveal a negative relation between the extent of Islamic religiosity of the CEO and the level of tax aggressive behavior. Furthermore, the results suggest that an increase in the CEO’s ownership stake strengthens the negative association between the CEO’s religiosity and the extent of tax aggressive behavior. Finally, the CEO’s involvement in Zakat payments is shown to mitigate the negative association between the CEO’s religiosity and the extent of tax aggressive behavior.

In contrast to prior research that examines the relationship between religiosity and tax aggressiveness within the context of other religions, particularly Christianity, in listed firms, and primarily considers the religiosity of the overall firm environment, the study centers on the CEO’s religiosity in private Islamic family firms. The Islamic context further enables us to investigate whether the fulfillment of Zakat diminishes the moral obligation experienced by religious CEOs to fulfill their tax responsibilities.

The importance of formal human resource (HR) practices is widely recognized in management literature, but under-researched in the small business and family firm domain. Previous research indicates that family firms rely more on informal HR practices, based on social networks. However, given the heterogeneity of family firms, one cannot assume that all family firms are reluctant to formalize their HR. As the CEO is the key decision maker who covers HR management in family firms, the effect of the CEO type on formal HR practices will be studied. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Based on a large-scale survey, resulting in a response of 532 family SMEs, the authors perform a hierarchical regression analysis studying the effect of a family/nonfamily CEO on the use of formal HR practices, introducing several moderating effects: CEO generational stage, tenure and education.

Results indicate that family firms with a family CEO have more formal HR practices than those managed by a nonfamily CEO due to higher levels of goal alignment and intentional trust between the owning family and family CEO. Moreover, family firms managed by first generation family CEOs and family CEOs with a higher education have more formal HR practices.

The findings suggest that family CEOs can be equally or even more able as nonfamily CEOs to run a family firm in a formalized/professionalized manner.

Given the scant amount of research on HR formalization in family firms, even though literature documents performance increasing effects, this study fulfils the need to study the effect of the CEO on HR formalization.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate several antecedents of succession planning in family firms: founder status, the family chief executive officer (CEO)’s inability to let go and the family CEO’s gender.

This study conducts moderated mediation analysis on a sample of 259 family firms.

The results show that family firms led by founders show lower succession planning levels than family firms led by descendant family CEOs. This effect is mediated by the family CEO’s inability to let go. Furthermore, the influence of the emotion of being unable to let go on succession planning is dependent on the family CEO’s gender. This influence is smaller when the family CEO is female than when the family CEO is male.

The study introduces the family CEO’s inability to let go as a mediator in the founder-succession planning relationship. The results add empirical evidence to the debate about gender influences in family firms. By showing that emotions have a different outcome concerning succession planning depending on the family CEO’s gender, this study enriches gender research. The study also contributes to the family business field by introducing relational theory as a valuable theoretical framework to include gender in succession research.

This paper aims to examine whether a private firm’s demand for a Big4 auditor is influenced by the auditor choice of its main supplier, customer and competitor. The authors rely on institutional theory to explain this stakeholders’ influence. The authors also examine whether the extent to which the firm’s board of directors engages in networking moderates this influence.

Questionnaire data are combined with archival data of 210 Belgian private firms with a statutory audit requirement. Logistic regression analysis is applied to examine to what extent firms follow their main competitor, customer and supplier in hiring a Big4 auditor.

The results reveal a positive association between the firm’s choice of a Big4 auditor and its main supplier being audited by a Big4 auditor, supporting the conformance effect (isomorphism) toward suppliers as hypothesized by institutional theory. The extent of board networking, however, seems to weaken this effect. Toward competitors, a divergence effect instead of a conformance effect is found, which indicates the existence of competitive differentiation regarding auditor choice.

While prior studies mainly focus on the agency relationships between shareholders, debtholders and managers to explain auditor choice, this study also takes into account the firm’s other main stakeholders by relying on institutional theory. Both the conformance effect toward suppliers as well as the divergence effect toward competitors provide interesting additional perspectives on why auditors are demanded, leading to interesting future research opportunities.

This paper fulfills an identified need to consider additional theories in explaining audit outcomes.

This paper seeks to examine the association between a firm's extent and precision of customer value disclosure and its implied cost of equity capital. In addition, it aims to investigate whether industry competition intensity attenuates this association.

The content of corporate websites from four continental European countries is analysed on the presence and precision of customer value information and empirically test whether content and precision are associated with the firm's implied cost of equity capital measurement.

The results show a negative association between cross‐sectional differences in the extent of customer value disclosure and cross‐sectional differences in a firm's cost of equity capital. In addition, the precision of the customer value information disclosed affects this association. It is observed that a negative relationship between quantitative (or hard) customer value disclosure and a firm's cost of equity capital, but not for qualitative (or soft) customer value disclosure. As expected, industry competition intensity attenuates the association between quantitative customer value disclosures and a firm's cost of equity capital.

The paper considers web placement of customer value disclosure although a firm might disclose such information through other information channels as well.

A firm tends to benefit economically from more precise customer value disclosure.

The paper extends existing evidence by considering the capital market implications of disclosing customer value information. In addition, it examines whether industry competition affects the association between customer value disclosure and the firm's cost of equity capital.

The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the impact of web‐based intellectual capital (IC) reporting on firm's value and its cost of finance.

A content‐analysis of corporate web sites is conducted from four continental European countries (Belgium, France, Germany and The Netherlands) on the presence of IC information. Simultaneous regression modelling is used to control for endogeneity within a firm's disclosure strategy.

The data show that cross‐sectional differences in the extent of IC disclosure are positively associated with firm value. Greater IC disclosure in continental Europe is associated with lower information asymmetry, lower implied cost of equity capital and lower rate of interest paid.

The study is restricted to an analysis of firm's benefits of increased web‐based disclosure without considering related costs.

The results of the study show that firms tend to benefit economically from better IC disclosure.

Existing evidence is extended by considering the capital market implications of IC related disclosure and web‐based related disclosure.