Abstract
This paper critically reviews and meta-analyzes the environmental performance of family firms. Using a sample of 40,910 firms (202,402 observations) covering a 12-year period (2008-2019), it concludes that the family business effect on environmental performance is negative, albeit small. We also find that moderating factors significantly affect the relationship between family influence and environmental performance. The negative family business effect is more pronounced in primary studies that use environmental practices as the measure of environmental performance and in those that use data from commercial databases. However, this effect is lower in studies that base their definition of family firms on ownership rather than other definitions. Overall, these findings provide the foundation for multiple new areas of inquiry as the research domain on environmental performance of family firms evolves over time.