Early adoption of non‐financial disclosure in family firms

Abstract This study investigates when the reputation enhancing signals of family firms include early adoption of non‐financial disclosure. Drawing on signalling theory, we examine the effect of family ownership on the early adoption of non‐financial disclosure and the moderating role of contingency signals: founder chief executive officer (CEO) leadership and employee degrowth rate. We test our hypotheses with panel regressions on a dataset of Italian listed family firms over the period 2013–2017, years before the introduction of mandatory non‐financial reporting. The results reveal an inverted U‐shaped relationship between family ownership and early adoption of non‐financial disclosure, negatively moderated by the presence of a founder CEO and positively moderated by employee degrowth. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.