This article analyses founding family influence on pay-out policies for Swiss listed firms over the period 2003–2010. We hypothesise that family firms have different incentives and characteristics that affect pay-out decisions and propose three possible explanations: agency theory, reputation building and family income needs. Our results show that founding family firms display significantly higher dividend pay-outs relative to companies with other ownership structures. We also examine specific family characteristics and document that a family's stake, active involvement and generation play an important role in determining pay-out policies. Our findings appear to be consistent with the family income hypothesis and to some extent with reputational concerns.

This paper examines how family and non-family ownership affects the performance of Swiss listed firms from 2003 to 2010. We distinguish between these two types of controlling shareholders since they have different objectives. We hypothesise that only family shareholders have a real incentive to reduce agency costs whereas non-family blockholders are similar to widely held companies. Our results show that family firms are more profitable than companies that are widely held or have a non-family blockholder. For market valuations we find that the family stake plays a critical role and document a concave relationship between family ownership and Tobin’s Q. We also investigate the impact of different features of family firms on performance, and document that the generation of the family and the active involvement of the family play an important role for market valuation.

We study the effect of dividend taxes on the payout and investment policies of publicly listed firms. We exploit a unique setting in Switzerland where, following the corporate tax reform of 2011, some but not all firms were suddenly able to pay tax-exempt dividends. We show that treated firms increase their dividend payout by around 30% after the tax cut. The effect on payout is less pronounced for firms prone to agency conflicts. We find a significant positive abnormal stock return after the announcement of the payment of a tax-exempt dividend. However, reducing dividend taxes does not boost investment.

We explore the effects of online customer ratings on financial policy. Using a large sample of Parisian restaurants, we find a positive and economically significant relationship between customer ratings and restaurant debt. We use the locally exogenous variations in customer ratings resulting from the rounding of scores in regression discontinuity tests to establish causality. Favorable online ratings reduce cash flow risk and increase resilience to demand shocks. Consistent with the view that good online ratings increase the debt capacity of restaurants and their growth opportunities, restaurants with good ratings use their extra debt to invest in tangible assets.