Discussion and Conclusion

Abstract

The main goal of this research project was to find out whether and why lenders deal differently with various types of family firms within the context of their lending decisions and more specifically in the course of their credit availability decisions. From an overall level and with respect to the first part of the main research question, the empirical results of the underlying experimental study show that the level of family involvement has a positive direct effect on loan officers’ credit availability decisions, indicating that lenders deal differently with family firms in that they tend to rather support family firms with higher levels of family influence in comparison to those where the family does not play such an integral role. The insight that family involvement has a significant effect on lenders’ decisions is generally in line with the author’s expectations. Nevertheless, it was not clear in which direction it would affect bank loan officers’ decisions as on the one hand the extant theoretical frameworks were not able to make such specific predictions and on the other hand the currently available literature on this topic reported mixed empirical conclusions (see hypotheses H1a – H3b).