“Family Companies”—Editorial Synthesis of Special Issue

This paper presents an editorial synthesis of the three substantive papers published in this Special Issue. The lens for this synthesis concerns the joint contribution of the three papers in identifying potential bases for explaining variation in Type 2 agency costs of equity in family companies. The papers included in this Special Issue, using data from Portugal and Africa, suggest three bases. These bases are Small-to-Medium Enterprise status, prevalence of third parties to reduce information asymmetry between the principals and agents, and domicile in South Africa (for African family businesses). It follows from the paper using data from Jordan that degree of tax avoidance would be a suitable measure of Type 2 agency costs of equity. Hence, it would be appropriate for future research to investigate whether this metric varies systematically, across family companies, according to these three bases.