Forty Years of Corporate Governance Research: A Review and Agenda

The research in the field of corporate governance has been deepening in the past forty years. Corporate governance has evolved from a research problem into a research field and eventually become a discipline. This paper uses bibliometric methods to review a total of 968 domestic and international research literature published in the field of corporate governance in 1978-2018, in order to reveal the research development emergence of corporate governance problems. Next, we summarize the domestic and international review literature in the field, and demonstrate the structure arrangement of this paper, which is to systematically review the theoretical context of Chinese corporate governance research for forty years. Then, this paper generally analyzes the foreign researches on corporate governance in terms of the research thesis and key words. Further, based on all the corporate governance literature published in three representative journals（namely, Economic Research, Management World and Nankai Business Review）from 1978 to 2018, this paper summarizes the numbers, author units, key words, research objects and research methods through large samples. We also analyze the relevant research development from three aspects: internal governance, external governance and other subject researches. Finally, this paper carries out summary and prospect of the corporate governance research. Research results show that the research on corporate governance in China has the following evolvements: Research development is from corporate governance structure to corporate governance mechanism, from corporate governance principles to corporate governance evaluation, from single corporate governance to group governance, from domestic corporate governance to multinational corporate governance, from administrative governance to economic governance, and from corporate governance to general governance. In order to better deepen the existing corporate governance research and point out the research development direction, this paper puts forward the following six key research directions based on the combing of the current corporate governance research literature: focus on the generality and particularity of various types of organizational governance; study the motivation, path and economic consequences of corporate governance transformation; expand the theory and method of corporate governance evaluation; deepen the areas and key issues of cross-disciplinary integration; study the mechanism optimization and risk prevention of network governance; further analyze the nature and laws of green governance.