关键词: 家族企业, 非核心家庭成员, 所有权涉入, 企业风险承担

Abstract: Risk-taking is the micro embodiment of entrepreneurship. In the face of favorable investment opportunities, firm risk-taking is conducive not only to the maximization of their own value, but also to the long-term growth of the national economy. However, though family firms are an important part of the private economy, their investment decisions are often considered to be risk averse mainly due to the controlling families' strong preference for socioemotional wealth. In fact, family is not a group of homogeneous individuals, and family members' preferences for socioemotional wealth and risk are often quite different. Taking A-share listed family firms in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2009 to 2019 as the research samples, this paper empirically finds that the ownership involvement of non-nuclear family members promotes firm risk-taking level. The promoting effect is still valid after a series of robustness tests, such as changing the independent variable measure, changing the screening criteria of the samples, and using the propensity matching score (PSM). The mechanism research shows that the ownership involvement of non-nuclear family members reduces the possibility of hiring family CEO and alleviates firm financing constraints, thus enhancing firm risk-taking level. This paper further explores the impact of non-core family members' ownership involvement heterogeneity on firm risk-taking, and finds that the ownership proportion of non-nuclear family members, the number of non-nuclear family members holding ownership and the management involvement of non-nuclear family members holding ownership can promote firm risk-taking. These empirical results provide more reliable evidence for the impact of the ownership involvement of non-nuclear family members on firm's risk-taking. In addition, further research also finds that firm risk-taking has a masking effect between the ownership involvement of non-nuclear family members and the firm value.
The theoretical contributions of this study are as follows: Firstly, the existing literature holds that the ownership involvement of non-core family members may aggravate conflicts and agency problems among family owners, thus impeding family firm governance efficiency. From the perspective of firm risk-taking, this paper provides empirical evidence for the positive effect of non-core family members' ownership involvement, and confirms that the goal difference between family members is not always destructive. Secondly, risk-taking is the core dimension of firm innovation and entrepreneurship. When investigating the antecedents of family firm risk-taking, existing studies mainly focus on the external governance factors and the involvement of the whole family, regardless of internal characteristics of the family. This paper focuses on the heterogeneity of family members' portfolio in the process of the ownership involvement, and explores the differences in risk-taking between firms with non-core family members' ownership involvement and firms without non-core family members' ownership involvement, thus enriching the relevant literature on the antecedents of family firm risk-taking.
This paper provides some enlightenment for family firms to optimize the ownership structure and the governance structure, and improve the level of risk-taking. Although the non-core family members are in a relatively distant position in the family relationship network, they still belong to the family and usually possess more heterogeneous human and material resources. Therefore, the family firm owner should properly absorb the non-core family members as shareholders to alleviate the firm's financing constraints and disperse the business operation risks, rather than blindly confining the ownership in the core family.

Key words: Family Firms, Non-nuclear Family Members, Ownership Involvement, Firm Risk-taking