Science AI Journal
Business, Management and Accounting · Research topic

Open research questions in Corporate Finance and Governance

136 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 4,268 Corporate Finance and Governance papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • In this study, we explore an intriguing yet understudied question: Would top managers decide to activate personal ties to manage their firms’ alliances? We address this question by synthesizing the insights of the research on personal tie activation and resource dependence theory to develop a nuanced theoretical framework on the mechanisms underlying top managers’ personal tie activation decisions in alliance management.

    Make the Alliance Personal: A Dependence Framework of Managerial Personal Tie Activation in Alliance Management · 2026 · DOI

  • Much of the existing literature remains conceptual, lacks a holistic approach to ESG, and offers limited evidence from emerging economies such as India.

    ESG integration in supply chain management and firm performance: Evidence from pharmaceutical and electronics firms in India · 2026 · DOI

  • Source: Authors The mixed results obtained from our hypothesis testing provide important insights when com- pared to existing research on ISO 9001 certification effects. Our finding that only 10 out of 19 firms showed performance improvements following recertifica- tion is consistent with Heras-Saizarbitoria and Boiral (2013), who reported mixed results for ISO 9001 effectiveness across different organizational contexts.

    ISO 9001 CERTIFICATION RENEWAL AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM MOROCCAN LISTED COMPANIES PANEL DATA ANALYSIS FROM THE CASABLANCA STOCK EXCHANGE · 2026 · DOI

  • Lastly, while this study examined the role of women CEOs, specifically due to the limitation of data, future research could explore the broader impact of gender diversity across different leadership levels, such as directors or other executive levels, to understand the decision-making of men and women leaders across different levels of leadership during uncertain periods.

    Did Cash Holding Affect Firm Performance During the Covid-19 Pandemic? The Role of Women CEOs · 2026 · DOI

  • The researcher has limited access to board meeting minutes, and access to the board’s deliberations would have helped the quality of board communication, innovation, and dynamics. However, the results of board decisions and attendance at board meetings show how seriously the board members have made themselves available for board business. Also, the quality of their communication and innovation is demonstrated in the performance of the management.

    The Board Structure and Dynamics’ Implications on Management Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa · 2026 · DOI

  • Concurrently, the significant role of media monitoring integrates this literature with stake- holder and legitimacy theories (Gu, 2024), revealing that the heightened vis- ibility of connected firms triggers a pressure to conform to societal expecta- tions on ESG, a nuanced channel previously underexplored in the political connections domain.

    Political connection and corporate ESG performance: Evidence from China · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research could address these gaps by incor- porating unlisted firms, sectoral dynamics, and higher-frequency data to capture more granular investment behavior. 2026, 1(1) 16 macroeconomic variables, sector-specific shocks and firm-level governance factors were not fully explored.

    Capital Structure Dynamics and Their Heterogeneous Effects on Firm Investment Decisions: Empirical Evidence from Emerging and Developed Economies · 2026 · DOI

  • on Contemporary Auditing, 1(7):35-47. Nogueira, E., Gomes, S. & Lopes, J.M., 2024. Financial sustainability: Exploring the influence of the triple bottom line economic dimension on firm performance. Sustainability, 16(15), p.6458. Nwankwo, K.C., Alpheaus, O.E., Godspower, J.O., & Onunaka, U.F., (2025).

    The Impact of Corporate Governance Mechanism On Environmental Sustainability in Nigeria: A Case Study of Access Bank Nigeria Plc · 2026 · DOI

  • While the existing literature has concentrated on total CEO compensation, the effects of its individual components such as fixed and variable compensation remain underexplored.

    Does CEO compensation affect earnings management in France? The mediating effect of corporate social responsibility · 2025 · DOI

  • Among the knowledge gaps opening up opportunities for further studies on this topic are: investigation of the phenomenon in companies in Latin America or comparatively in emerging countries worldwide, use of a behavioral approach to analyze investor motivations, and the presence of institutional investors as IPO inducers.

    Determinants of IPO´s underpricing: A systematic review · 2023 · DOI

  • Though this issue attracted a lot of attention from scholars during the last 30 years, and the consensus has formed that there are indeed differences in motivational factors, managerial capabilities as well as risk-taking decisions between founder/shareholder-CEOs and professional-CEOs, the research on how this impacts firm performance provides inconsistent results.

    EVALUATION OF DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCE BETWEEN SHAREHOLDER-CEO-LED AND PROFESSIONAL-CEO-LED LARGE COMPANIES IN LITHUANIA · 2023 · DOI

  • Apart from challenging the underpinning assumptions of the dominating view of value denoting acquiring shareholders’ financial wealth, we identify non-economic marginalized values that are only rarely studied, including justice or gender equality, and pertinent neglected values, including the natural environment.

    Towards a more inclusive notion of values in acquisition research · 2023 · DOI

  • Similarly, a second moderation analysis conducted to test the interaction of liquidity measurements with executive CSR compensation on CSR performance produces mixed results.

    Corporate social responsibility: Is it a matter of slack financial resources or strategy or both? · 2021 · DOI

  • Background: The article adds to the limited literature on CEO turnover in emerging market coun­tries and extends the existing research to a different institutional setting with a particular focus on listed companies in an increasingly important Polish business environment.

    Does CEO founder status protect against dismissal? · 2020 · DOI

  • The results (a) provide some of the most robust evidence to date that shareholder value strategies of cost-cutting and implicit contract violations can adversely affect non-labor stakeholders; and (b) help to theorize the growing but understudied role of private equity as a transitional ownership form that spreads shareholder value strategies to privately held firms.

    Agile predators: private equity and the spread of shareholder value strategies to US for-profit colleges · 2020 · DOI

  • Managerial Summary The conflicting evidence on the relation between CSR and firm performance may influence a manager's decision to invest in CSR activities and an investor's decision to invest in a firm.

    On the relation between corporate social responsibility and financial performance · 2020 · DOI

  • Despite the intuitive appeal of the theory, previous tests of RPE find weak and inconsistent evidence, which we argue is due to the imprecise categorization of peers.

    Product Market Peers and Relative Performance Evaluation · 2020 · DOI

  • Due to issues with manual data collection and market results generalization based on small populationof KASE listed companies, research literature on Kazakhstani data is scarce.

    EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH WORK: EARNINGS MANAGEMENT (EM) AND FIRM-LEVEL DETERMINANTS · 2019 · DOI

  • While prior research has focused on the effect of CEO overconfidence on innovation, few studies have been conducted to reveal how and whether an overconfident CEO affects ambidextrous innovation, which means the simultaneous and balanced pursuit of both exploratory and exploitative innovation.

    CEO Overconfidence and Ambidextrous Innovation · 2017 · DOI

  • Despite the importance that scholars and practicing managers attribute to the organizational design of the corporate headquarters (CHQ), research on changes in CHQ size is lacking.

    DOES HEADQUARTER STRUCTURE FOLLOW CORPORATE STRATEGY? AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF CHANGES IN THE SIZE OF CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS · 2017 · DOI

  • Decades of research on the effectiveness of CEO duality as a governance mechanism have produced inconsistent results, providing support and non-support for agency and stewardship theories.

    Effectiveness of CEO Power Bundles and Discretion Context: Unpacking the ‘Fuzziness’ of the CEO Duality Puzzle · 2017 · DOI

  • Design/methodology/approach Inconsistent findings and a general lack of empirical results for the microfinance industry leave an unclear message regarding the impacts of CG on MFI performance, especially in emerging economies.

    Dynamic endogeneity and corporate governance-performance relationship · 2017 · DOI

  • The inconsistent results provided by these indices prompted the authors to offer a new index that is a composite of the PIN and FE that can better explain information asymmetry in developing market such as Asian stock markets.

    Measuring Information Asymmetry in Large Active Firms on the Tehran Stock Exchange · 2016 · DOI

  • Papers use either idiosyncratic stock return volatility or R2 as interchangeable measures of firm-specific return variation but report inconsistent results.

    R2 and Idiosyncratic Risk Are Not Interchangeable · 2014 · DOI

  • (12) We argue that the successes of such improvements in corporate governance were insufficient to rationalize this upward trend in median pay figures.

    Executive Superstars, Peer Groups, and Overcompensation: Cause, Effect, and Solution · 2013

Most-cited papers in Corporate Finance and Governance

Most recent work

Find a gap in your own Corporate Finance and Governance sub-topic

This page shows what the Corporate Finance and Governance literature already flags as unresolved. To narrow it to your specific question, run the guided finder — it searches the gap library on demand and checks candidates against 250M+ OpenAlex works.

Open the Research Gap Finder →

Related topics in Business, Management and Accounting

Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
652 open questions
Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences
453 open questions
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
337 open questions
Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting
293 open questions
Environmental Sustainability in Business
211 open questions
Management and Organizational Studies
186 open questions
Customer Service Quality and Loyalty
174 open questions
International Business and FDI
159 open questions
136 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 4,268 Corporate Finance and Governance papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

Tools for your next paper

Gaps & Literature SearchFind open questions in any field — 120,000+ open gaps mined from our own library.Pre-CheckIs your paper ready? A Tier 1–5 acceptance probability in seconds.Journal FinderA ranked shortlist of target journals from a 17,500-venue index.Duplicate Publication CheckerCheck prior-publication & salami-slicing risk across 8 sources.Citation GeneratorFreeA DOI or title → APA, MLA, Vancouver, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS. No signup.Graphical Abstract MakerFreeTurn your findings into a colorblind-safe graphical abstract.

Compare the category — Honest roundups of the AI research tools, ours listed alongside the alternatives.

Command palette

Jump anywhere, run any action.