**2. Literature review strategy and sample selection**

#### **2.1 Review method**

This study uses a systematic literature review to integrate the existing literature on agency theory advancement in the context of international business. The systematic method of the literature review was proposed by Tranfield et al. [9] in medical science literature, to overcome the criticism of the traditional literature review. A traditional literature review involves the subjectivity and bias of the researcher. The main objective of the systematic literature review is to identify research key contributions in a field and descriptively present and discuss them.

There are two important steps in the systematic literature review:


#### *2.1.1 The inclusion criteria*

This study uses the following criteria to include review articles:


*Agency Theory and Internationalization: A Critical Assessment of Literature DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99192*

#### *2.1.2 Study selection and data source*

This study uses Business Source Ultimate of the EBSCO database to find the relevant articles. The focus of the study was on top ranked international business journals. EBSCO includes all the top ranked journals in the field of international business which includes top international business journals indexed in Web of Science or Scopus databases. The author uses a combination of the keywords: agency and internationalization to find the relevant articles. The search using these keywords in title, abstract, and author keyword in the database yielded a total of 132 articles. Further, the author removes duplicate and below B category journal articles (as per ABDC ranking) and finds 59 articles for further use in the study. The author read the abstract and the introduction of these 59 articles whenever required to find relevant studies. Finally, the author finds 24 relevant articles that meet the objective of the study. **Table 1** lists all the review studies with journal name, the theory used, country or context, method (qualitative/ quantitative), and analytical techniques.

## **3. Findings and discussion**

#### **3.1 Descriptive analysis**

This section discusses various descriptive characteristics of the review articles. There is an increasing trend of publication of studies using agency theory to study MNCs. **Figure 1** shows an increasing trend of using agency theory in the context of firm internationalization after 2010. **Figure 2** shows that review studies are published in various management journals. The highest number of publications from the sample studies are from the International Business Review and Journal of Business Research. Most of the sample studies have integrated agency theory with the resource-based view, resource dependency theory, and institutional theory (see **Table 2**). Firm internationalization is a complex process and requires more than one theory to explain the underlying phenomenon. Most of the articles are based on a single institutional or country context (see **Figure 3**). Most of the articles are empirical and primarily use a diverse set of quantitative techniques (see **Table 3**).

#### **3.2 Corporate governance and agency theory**

As per the agency perspective, the divergence of interest between the principal and agent causes opportunistic behavior by agents to maximize their utility and reduces the shareholders' value [34]. Firms use several governance mechanisms to mitigate agency costs such as monitoring by the board of directors [35], and high ownership by outsiders [36]. There exist internal as well as external mechanisms to control the agency problem [25]. Internal governance mechanism is such as CEO compensation alignment with the shareholders' value maximization [37]. The external mechanism is market control such as the threat of takeover, and competition in the labor and product market [38]. Further, this study divides the literature into various themes.

#### *3.2.1 Board of Directors (BOD)*

BOD has the roles of managing the top management's hiring to firing, providing information and network resources, and assisting top management to decide


#### *Corporate Governance - Recent Advances and Perspectives*

