Socioemotional Wealth and Debt Contract Design in Family Firms: Leverage, Maturity, and Rollover Risk in France

Purpose – This study examines how socioemotional wealth (SEW) shapes the design of corporate debt in family firms by separating the leverage margin from the debt-maturity margin, and by interpreting maturity as rollover-risk management that protects long-term orientation. Design/methodology/approach – Using a matched panel of French non-financial firms (2010–2024) linked to ownership structures, governance events and leadership narratives, we operationalize SEW along three dimensions: family control (F), family identity (I) and emotional attachment (E). We estimate firm fixed-effects and industry×year fixed-effects models, dynamic System-GMM for leverage, and succession-based quasi-experiments (difference-in-differences and interaction-weighted event studies). Robustness and mechanism tests are reported in the Supplementary Material. Findings – Family control is positively associated with leverage, consistent with non-dilutive control preservation. In contrast, identity and emotional attachment are associated with longer debt maturity, and these maturity effects are stronger for innovative firms and during refinancing-stress episodes (COVID-19 and the 2022–2023 monetary-tightening period). Supplementary mechanism evidence indicates that identity/attachment align with more concentrated relationship lending, lower short-term-debt exposure and lower proxy borrowing costs. Originality/value – The study contributes to corporate finance by linking SEW to the term structure of debt and rollover risk; to the SEW literature by relying on multidimensional (including text-based) measures rather than a simple family-ownership dummy; and to comparative family-business research by showing how a bank-based setting (France) and crisis/innovation regimes shape the translation of SEW motives into debt contract design.