Innovation Performance of Family Firms in Comparative Perspective: the Role of Regional Corruption in Europe and Russia (con V.Golikova e B. Kuznetsov)

The paper focuses on the role of institutional deficiencies, i.e. corruption, in affecting the innovative performance of family firms versus non-family businesses in 7 European countries and Russia that represent two large geographical areas with different history of institutional development. The comparative quantitative empirical analysis is based on the common self-identification of family firms and identical sample design of surveys implemented in EU in 2010 and in Russia in 2014, correspondingly. As the family business is embedded into the regional environment (Stough et al, 2015) we extend the analysis to the regional level taking into account the heterogeneity of family firms in the variety of dimensions (Welter, 2011). Using an indicator of corruption for EU (Charron et al, 2014) and for Russian Federation (Petrov and Titkov, 2013) we divide regions into two groups with high and low level of corruption to capture the difference of family firms innovation performance and behaviour in various institutional environment. Results show that the probability of family firms to innovate, either by the introduction of a new product or a new process, is higher than non-family firms in the case of the EU sample. For Russia, family firms perform better in terms of product innovation however only in the case of older firms. As far as the role of corruption at the regional level is concerned, only old Russian family firms appear to be more innovative in regions with low corruption while, in general, all the European firms benefit from location in the regions with low corruption.