Title: Cross-border mergers and acquisitions: a bibliometric review and future research avenues

Authors: Nuno Rosa Reis; Fernando Manuel Pereira Oliveira Carvalho; José Vasconcelos Ferreira

Addresses: School of Technology and Management, Centre of Applied Research in Management and Economics (CARME), Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Morro do Lena – Alto Vieiro, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal ' Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Avenida Doutor Dias da Silva 165, 3004-512 Coimbra, Portugal ' Department of Economics, Management and Industrial Engineering, University of Aveiro, Campo Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal

Abstract: Cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMAs) are an important mode of international expansion and have attracted substantial scholarly attention in the last decades. The extant literature on CBMAs is fragmented and often presents contradictory perspectives which hinder the researchers' ability to understand the phenomenon. Therefore it is useful to analyse the extant literature on CBMAs, to make sense of what has been published, in a systematic and objective way. In this paper we conduct a bibliometric review of CBMA research over a 20-year period (1994-2013). Using a sample of 256 articles published in 69 journals we performed citation, co-citation and factor analyses, structural and longitudinal, to understand the most influential works and to observe the evolution of the themes and theoretical approaches used. We identified the importance of culture-related works as well as the increasing importance of resource-and knowledge-related approaches, whereas finance/economics perspectives have a decreasing influence.

Keywords: mergers and acquisitions; cross-border M&As; international acquisitions; bibliometric review.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBBM.2019.097725

International Journal of Bibliometrics in Business and Management, 2019 Vol.1 No.3, pp.189 - 213

Received: 29 Jan 2018
Accepted: 03 Mar 2018
Published online: 06 Feb 2019 *

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