SMU Associate Professor of Accounting Chen Xia studies corporate governance and financial management of family firms. Her interest in family firms began while she was pursuing her doctorate at the University of Chicago. It was there that she became aware of the importance of family-owned businesses not only to corporate America but also to the country’s entire economy. Nearly 90 per cent of all business enterprises in North America are family-owned, and family businesses also account for half of the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP) and employ more than half of its labour force. Associate Prof Chen said that her current studies focus on American family-owned firms because most of them are publicly traded, making it easier for her to obtain data. This kind of transparency is not available for Asian family firms. In a recent study, she, together with her long-time collaborators SMU Professor of Accounting Cheng Qiang and Zhonglan Dai, Associate Professor at the University of Texas in Dallas, examined the impact of a founding family’s presence on CEO turnover decisions. They did this by measuring CEO turnover-performance sensitivity, or the correlation between CEO turnover and performance.