The global market scope/export performance relationship in family SMEs: An analysis of external managers and external capital in five European regions

This study aims to contribute to the debate on family SMEs internationalisation, shedding light on the relationship between their global market scope and export performance. We adopt a transaction cost economics (TCE) approach and we hypothesise that family SMEs carry an inverted U-shaped relationship between global geographic scope and export performance. Moreover, we hypothesise that the presence of external managers and outside capital influence this inverted relationship. Using a sample of 446 family SMEs in five European regions the empirical analysis supports our hypotheses. We discuss theoretical contributions and practical implications.