This control is required because
the family might want to change ownership structure,
our independent variable, presumably in such an opportunistic
fashion as to increase its cash flow rights in firmswith organizational
resources. At the same time, such marketing
resources can influence performance, our dependent variable.
Unless this variable is controlled for, the focal relation becomes
spurious; parameter estimates of the separation should
be biased. This variable was operationalized as advertising
expenditure divided by sales. We also controlled for prior
performance to factor a partial adjustment process of firm
performance into our estimation models, which will be detailed
below. For this measure, we conducted one year lag
for the two dependent variables