The present study analyzes the nexus among business growth, ownership structure, and local embeddedness—that is, the involvement of economic actors in a geographically bound social structure—in rural and urban contexts. This work combines regional economics with studies on family business and firm growth and uses a coarsened matched sample of privately held Swedish firms. The findings indicate that family firms benefit more than nonfamily firms from local embed- dedness and as such they achieve higher levels of growth and that this effect is more pronounced in rural areas. Research implications are shared in the Conclusion section.
