SUMMARY
This paper examines the impact of ownership’s type (more precise the impact of the family ownership) on the firm’s financial performance for a sample of 1,161 Romanian companies and 1,342 German companies, in a time frame that range from 2008 to 2015. The main findings show very different results for the two considered countries. Financial performance, expressed as return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE) seems to be insensitive to family ownership in Romanian companies and statistically positively correlated with it for German ones. A potential explanation for these outputs consists in the different development circumstances in the two countries in the period that forego the Second War. Other variables considered do not show significant differences in outcome between the two countries: size, age, capital intensity and leverage negatively influence the financial performance of companies.