Trends in Zombie Firms Research: A Bibliographic Review

The aim of the paper is to explore the knowledge infrastructure of research addressing the zombie issue using a bibliometric review approach combined with content analysis. The review includes 114 papers by 247 authors in 77 journals compiled using Web of Science database. The study demonstrates an exponential increase in research on the zombie issue after 2018, identifies four research streams within this topic, discusses their main findings so far, and proposes some research challenges and future research agenda of this relatively new research theme.