Family business succession is a vital issue in corporate finance and management. Drawing from corporate governance perspective in finance and socio-emotional wealth approach in management, this paper reveals the interesting relationship between religion and family business succession intention. Using nationwide family firm survey data, we find that family firm founders' religiosity is conducive to their succession intention. Family firm founders' religiosity and family firm's socioemotional wealth interactively strengthen management succession intention, but not ownership succession intention. We also find that Eastern religious beliefs, especially Buddhism, strengthen the religiosity-succession relation in Chinese family firms.

Bribery, rather than firm performance, largely determines the extent to which private firms access bank credit in China. Bribery enables an economic outcome whereby firms with better economic performance are awarded larger loans. These firms also pay more in terms of bribes. Although satisfactory firm performance does determine whether firms can access loans, it does so only for loans originated by the big-four banks. For loans originated by smaller banks, performance is not essential for firms to secure loan access. Our evidence sheds light on the surprising finding of earlier studies that Chinese banks use commercial logic in their lending practices despite being endowed with a weak institutional framework.