Nepotism or Stewardship? What CEO Successions in Family Firms Really Tell Investors

Published 30 July 2026 by Raul Barroso, Oskar Kowalewski and Prabesh Luitel from a paper presented at the 4th Baltic Family Firm Institute and ECGI Conference, built on a dataset of over 1,600 CEO appointments in listed family firms worldwide. Over half of successions, 55 per cent, hand the role from one hired CEO to another, family-to-hired transitions are 36 per cent and hired-to-family 9 per cent, while direct family-to-family handovers are almost nonexistent; nearly 60 per cent of professionalisations promote an internal non-family executive rather than recruiting outside. Share price movements around the announcements show neither an average professionalisation premium nor a refamilisation discount, and what moves the market is the control structure behind the appointment, with a more positive reaction where the controlling family had substantial ownership or voting rights and delegated anyway.