Family SMEs as enablers or barriers to climate neutrality: A multi-level perspective on transformational management

Family firms are the dominant ownership form among European SMEs, and socioemotional wealth theory predicts their environmental behaviour in opposing directions: long-term orientation favours stewardship, capital-commitment aversion favours retrenchment. Because firm-level ownership data linked to environmental outcomes do not exist at European scale, this literature substitutes the small-firm share of a sector for the family ownership its theory concerns. We ask whether that substitution is defensible.

We test four hypotheses on 3,352 sector-country-year observations, twelve sectors in twenty EU member states, 2009-2023. The dependent variable is the annual decarbonisation rate: the negative first difference of log greenhouse gas intensity per unit of value added. Data come from Eurostat air emissions accounts, business statistics, environmental tax accounts and business demography, and from ECB interest rate statistics. Models use additive country, sector and year fixed effects, with errors clustered by country-sector.

No hypothesis is supported. The coefficient on SME concentration is negative throughout but insignificant (β1 = -0.034, p = 0.104), and the null is informative rather than inconclusive: the confidence interval [-0.074, + 0.007] excludes positive associations of consequence. Moderation by financing costs, tax exposure and enterprise maturity does not reach five per cent (p = 0.090, 0.690, 0.053). One association is robust: sectors starting from higher intensity decarbonise faster (β2 = +0.021, p < 0.001). A second, on tax exposure, proves an artefact of tax-base composition and of a shared denominator.

Sectoral SME concentration is not a usable proxy for family-firm environmental behaviour: 58.7 per cent of its variance is sector membership, and correcting for measurement error leaves the estimate unchanged. We read this as evidence about the limits of ecological inference in family business research, not as a refutation of the theory. Progress requires linking ownership registers to environmental records.