Ultimately, the family’s influence on firm performance is an empirical issue that we investigate in this study. We examine the impact of family ownership on firm performance by addressing four specific issues. First, are family firms less profitable or less valuable than nonfamily firms? Second, does the relation between family ownership and firm performance differ between younger and older family firms? Third, if founding family ownership influences performance, is the performance/ownership relation linear over all ranges of family holdings? Fourth, does the level of family involvement or family members acting as CEO negatively impact firm performance? Our investigation provides an analysis of these questions, using firm-level data on large publicly traded U.S. firms.