Family Business, ESG, and Firm Age in the GCC Corporations: Building on the Socioemotional Wealth (SEW) Model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the relationship between private family control (excluding state and royal) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance among publicly listed firms in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), focusing specifically on the moderating role of firm age. Employing multivariate POLS regression analysis on data from 2016 to 2021 and controlling for established firm-specific variables, we find a robust negative association between private family control and ESG performance, consistent with Socioemotional Wealth (SEW) perspectives where family-centric goals may override broader stakeholder interests. Critically, our results demonstrate that firm age significantly and positively moderates this negative relationship; the detrimental impact of family control on ESG performance attenuates considerably as family firms mature. This attenuation likely reflects the development of sophisticated governance structures, a heightened focus on long-term reputation and SEW preservation, and potential generational shifts towards sustainability values within older firms. Providing the first empirical test of this age moderation effect within the under-researched GCC context, this research extends SEW theory by highlighting the dynamic evolution of family firm sustainability engagement over the lifecycle in a non-Western setting and contributes novel insights to the accounting literature. These findings underscore the need for targeted policies and interventions to foster ESG adoption, particularly among younger private family firms in the GCC, offering valuable insights for regulators, investors, family business owners, and practitioners aiming to foster responsible sustainability practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".