We explore the conflicts between the controlling founder of a firm and her family members by studying how their ownership affects executive compensation differently. Using a sample of family firms in China, we find that the ownership of a controlling family owner is negatively correlated with the level of executive compensation and has a positive effect on pay-for-performance sensitivity. However, the ownership of other family members is positively associated with executive compensation and has a negative effect on pay-for-performance sensitivity. We find that when the quality of corporate governance is low and when other family members hold excess control rights in the firm, the unfavorable effect of other family members is more striking.

Many emerging markets allow foreign investment as a way to reform domestic markets. Extant studies have found a positive externality on innovation brought forth by foreign direct investment (FDI); however, we know very little about the externality of another form of foreign investment, ownership by foreign institutional investors (FII), on innovation. In this paper, we document one form of FII externality by showing that foreign institutional ownership of the customer firm results in higher supplier innovation. We also show that the FII externality on supplier innovation is stronger when customers have more influence on the suppliers and when the FIIs can facilitate information flow better. Our findings suggest that the real impact of FII can go beyond the underlying firms, and promoting FII may benefit firms, especially smaller firms in emerging countries that do not directly have foreign ownership.

This study examines whether and how linguistic information quality (measured by readability) of customer firms' management earnings forecast reports (MEFRs) affects supplier firms' investment quality (measured by investment efficiency). Our analyses reveal that supplier investment efficiency is positively associated with the average linguistic information quality of customers' prior MEFRs, and the positive association between supplier investment efficiency and customer MEFRs' numerical information quality is stronger in supplier firms with more readable customer MEFRs. Our analyses also reveal that higher linguistic information quality of customer MEFRs improves the monitoring of supplier firms by their outside stakeholders, such as institutional investors and financial analysts, and ameliorates the negative impact of suppliers' customer‐dependence on their investment efficiency. Our results suggest that greater linguistic information quality of a customer firm's forward‐looking disclosures is associated with higher‐quality investments made by its suppliers along the supply chain.