Mergers and acquisitions in higher education based on the theory of the growth of the firm

This article analyzes 18 years (2000-2017) of publications on Mergers and Acquisitions of Higher Education Institutions around the world. The biblionnetric survey found one hundred and eighty-seven articles whose focus was the intersection of these themes. Once the filters were applied, the final sample had fifty-two articles. Among the main findings obtained with the analysis of these fifty-two articles, it is observed that there is a predominance of qualitative researches and without the occurrence of publication whose theoretical basis is based on the Theory of Firm Growth. Most of the articles found have their roots in economics and education. The lack of research on Mergers and Acquisitions in the subsector of higher education reveals an excellent contribution of this article, since it brings an unexplored and relevant prism to this type of phenomenon. In the last ten years, in Brazil alone, more than two hundred mergers and acquisitions of higher education institutions occurred. The expected theoretical and empirical contribution to the results presented here is to foster future research on M & E in the higher education sector in light of Penrose's Theory of Firm Growth (1959). In addition, this article also aims to demonstrate the importance of the production of quantitative articles to test hypotheses related to mergers and acquisitions, mainly studies that can analyze significant samples within the national universe and that use variables other than those related to financial performance.