Bibliometric review of research on corporate governance and firm value

Abstract

This study aims to provide a bibliometric review (Zupic & Čater, 2015; Hallinger, 2019) of the corporate governance and firm value knowledge base. This paper is guided by PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) and based on the Scopus index for determining and extracting data. A total of 1,661 articles from 1983 to 2021 are included. The USA, the UK, and Australia are the leaders in the literature. A significant gap exists for further research from developing and non-Western settings. We identified authors with the highest citations (Danny Miller, Luc Renneboog, and Kose John), the most prominent authors based on the citation for each document (Danny Miller, Luc Renneboog, and Igor Filatotchev), and the most highly cited documents (“Higher market valuation of companies with a small board of directors”, Yermack, 1996; “Disentangling the incentive and entrenchment effects of large shareholdings”, Claessens et al., 2002, and “Boards: Does one size fit all?”, Coles et al., 2008). Besides, the review reveals an intellectual structure of the corporate governance and firm value knowledge base in three schools of thought: agency theory, firm value, and boards of directors. Our findings provide an overview of top-influential research for new scholars and enable us to identify highly cited theoretical foundations quickly.