Mergers and acquisitions in the financial industry: A bibliometric review and future research directions

The growing application of bibliometric reviews in Finance, as well as the ongoing consolidation processes across firms and countries, motivated this study on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the Financial Industry. From a starting count of around 4500 papers, we refine our database accordingly to keywords and journal quality, reviewing a final sample of 174 papers. By combining bibliometric and content analysis, we identify leading journals, countries, institutions, authors, articles, and related research questions that mostly contributed to this field. Moreover, we provide a keyword/cartographic analysis identifying five leading research streams and their evolution over time, that we extensively discuss. Finally, we summarize the main questions proposed by the literature as a suggestion for future research.