Rafel Crespí-Cladera
Full Professor (Catedràtic) of Business Administration, Organization and Management
Department d'Economia de l'Empresa, Universitat de les Illes Balears
I study corporate governance, family business, and ownership structure — how boards, owners, and institutions shape firm behavior, from listed companies to small firms and business groups.
Recent Research
A Property Rights Theory of Business Groups: Explaining Their Ubiquity around the Globe
Business groups — networks of legally separate firms under common control — are everywhere, in rich and poor economies alike, yet standard theories of the firm struggle to explain why. This paper builds a property-rights account of why owners choose to bundle businesses into groups rather than into a single integrated company or a set of arm's-length firms, and shows how the answer depends on how well the surrounding institutions protect control and cash-flow rights. Newly accepted after a three-round revision.
Read more →The Governance of Family Business Groups
Research on family business groups has focused almost entirely on large listed conglomerates, yet a global dataset of more than 16,000 family business groups across 80-plus countries shows that 96% have no listed affiliate at all. This chapter documents how much governance varies with group size, listing status and the depth of family involvement, and argues that one-size-fits-all governance prescriptions do not work for the vast unlisted majority of family capitalism.
Read more →Exploring the Spatial Segmentation of Housing Markets from Online Listings
A large-scale, data-driven look at how housing and short-term rental markets sort themselves into neighborhoods, using online listing data — a departure from governance topics into computational urban economics, part of a Balearic housing-market research project.
Read more →La estructura y el gobierno corporativo de la empresa familiar
A chapter for practitioners and family-business owners walking through why governance matters even inside a family firm — the three-circles model, and which governance structures actually help families balance ownership, management, and family interests as the business grows.
Read more →The Second Glass Ceiling: The Dark Side of Women Recategorization in Corporate Boards
Getting a woman onto the board is only the first glass ceiling. This paper argues there's a second, subtler one: once on the board, women directors can be recategorized in ways that limit their influence — the published outcome of years of conference work on "the glass ceiling" (Copenhagen 2022, Miami 2022 Best Paper Nominee).
Read more →Ownership, Control, and Productivity: Family Firms in Comparative Perspective
Family firms are often assumed to be less productive than non-family firms — but this paper shows that the real story depends on how ownership and control are structured, not on family involvement alone. Comparing firms across countries, we find the productivity gap narrows or disappears once governance structure is taken into account.
Read more →The Corporate Governance of Business Groups: What We Know and What Lies Ahead
A review-article stepping back from any single study to ask: across two decades of research on business groups, what has the field actually established, and where are the real open questions? A roadmap for where this research line — one of Rafel's most active — goes next.
Read more →Optimal Board Independence with Gray Independent Directors
Regulators tend to push for strictly independent boards, but this paper argues that "gray" directors — formally independent, yet retaining some tie to the firm — can actually improve monitoring by combining independence with useful firm-specific knowledge.
Read more →Financial Distress in the Hospitality Industry During the Covid-19 Disaster
When the pandemic hit tourism overnight, which hotel and hospitality firms survived? This paper traces the answer to ownership and capital structure decisions made long before the crisis — now our most-cited recent paper, with over 230 citations.
Read more →Business Groups and Internationalization: Effective Identification and Future Agenda
Business groups look very different from country to country, which makes them notoriously hard to define consistently in research. We propose a clearer way to identify them and lay out where the field should go next in studying how they expand abroad.
Read more →Politicians in the Boardroom: Is It a Convenient Burden?
Politically connected directors are a double-edged sword: useful for navigating regulation and access, costly when they crowd out independent oversight. We look at when the balance tips one way or the other.
Read more →→ Full publication list, working papers, and funded projects