From the socioemotional wealth and temporal perspectives, we examine how family management and firm age influence a firm’s choices between product diversification and international diversification. We hypothesize that family management is positively related to the preference for product diversification over international diversification and that the positive relationship becomes stronger among older firms. Our projections receive support from dynamic panel analyses of a sample of 422 manufacturing firms from the S&P 1,500 using the system generalized method of moments (GMM) approach. Our findings suggest that family management’s tendencies to preserve SEW lead to a stronger preference towards product diversification over time.
