Age and entrepreneurship: Mapping the scientific coverage and future research directions

Abstract

Researchers’ interest in studying the relationship between age and entrepreneurship has mushroomed in the last decade. While over a hundred articles are published and indexed in the Scopus database alone with varying and fragmented results, there has been a lack of effort in reviewing, integrating, and classifying the literature. This article offers a framework-based systematic review of 174 articles to comprehend the relationship and influencing factors related to an individual's age and entrepreneurship. Bibliographic coupling is used to identify the prominent clusters in the literature on this topic and the most influential articles. Also, the TCCM review framework is adopted to provide a comprehensive insight into dominant theories applied, contexts (geographic regions and industries) incorporated, characteristics (antecedents, consequences, mediating and moderating variables, and their relationships) investigated, and research methods employed in age and entrepreneurship research over the last fifteen (2007–2022). Though the literature covers an array of industries, to better understand the age-entrepreneurship correlation, we need to investigate the new-age technologically driven business sectors further to expand our knowledge. Furthermore, we detect that the Theory of Planned Behavior mostly dominates the literature, with other theories trivially employed. Finally, we apply the TCCM framework to suggest fertile areas for future research.