Family Firm IPOs: A Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The principal method of raising public funds by a private firm is Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). This area has attracted researcher’s attention (40,559 publications) because when private firms go public, they have different decision-making processes, goals, attitudes, performance and corporate governance. We examined the publication trend in the field of family firm IPOs with the help of bibliometric data extracted from Scopus because familyownership is a prominent feature of firms worldwide. The search string used includes “Family Firm” and a wildcard “IPO”, which yielded only 64 peerreviewed articles written in English Language. Thus, family firm IPOs is an under-researched area but have been growing rapidly. The paper has done bibliometric analysis using VOS viewer software and systematic literature review to objectively identify influential authors, seminal works, emerging topics and directions for future research.The study has identified a significant scope for future research given the limited number of influential articles mainly by developed nations focusing on Agency, SEW(Socio-Emotional Wealth) and Signaling theory only.