Bibliographic analysis of the scholarly writings of Raj Aggarwal
Provides an historical overview of Raj Aggarwal's research interests and publications, created by using the Publish or Perish software
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Written by Anne-Wil Harzing, AIB Fellows Bibliometrician. This analysis first appeared in the AIB Newsletter [link to come].
Introduction
Raj Aggarwal’s impressive publishing career spanned exactly 50 years, with his first publication appearing in 1975 and his last publication in 2025. Fittingly for an International Business scholar, his first two journal articles in 1975 were published in Columbia Journal of World Business and Management International Review, both discussing the difficulties of dealing with foreign subsidiary financial statements, whilst his last two publications were a tribute to Yair Aharoni and a chapter on the Evolution of International Business Teaching in a book on the Historical Evolution of International Business. He continued to publish regularly in Management International Review, with another publication in the seventies, and four publications each in the 1980s and 1990s. With ten publications Management International Review therefore was his most frequent disciplinary outlet.
However, he also published an article in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) early in his career in 1980 on the investment performance of US multinationals and contributed no less than four substantive 3–6-page book reviews to this journal between 1988 and 1992. Moreover, he published five articles in International Business Review and four articles in Thunderbird International Business Review [formerly The International Executive], as well as two articles in Multinational Business Review, thus having published regularly in six core IB journals.
However, as an IB scholar focusing on International Finance, he also published extensively in a very wide range of Finance journals. These include the Journal of Banking & Finance (8), International Review of Financial Analysis (6), Journal of Economics and Business (6), Financial Review (5), Journal of Multinational Financial Management (5), Journal of Financial Research (4), Managerial Finance (4), and Research in International Business and Finance (4). In addition, he has contributed to other prestigious finance journals, such as Journal of Corporate Finance, Financial Management, Journal of International Money and Finance, and Journal of Business, Finance, and Accounting. Most strikingly, between 2011 and 2023 he published nearly fifty articles in the Journal of Teaching in International Business (JTIB). Most of these articles were editorials.
Aggarwal single-authored about a third of his publications, including his most cited article “Exchange rates and stock prices: A study of the US capital markets under floating exchange rates” (Akron Business & Economic Review, 1981). However, he also had longstanding co-authors such as NyoNyo Kyaw, Brian Lucey, Cal Muckley, David Schirm, Luc Soenen, Yinglu Wu, Sijing Zong, and in particular John Goodell, with whom he co-authored more than 40 articles. Aggarwal’s very large body of scholarly work amounted to more than 300 publications overall, including many book chapters, book reviews, contributions to handbooks, encyclopedia, and popular media, and has been cited more than 11,000 times in Google Scholar, with an h-index of 53.
Below is a brief summary of his most important work. Note that as International Accounting & Finance is one of the areas of International Business that I know least about and that analyzing more than 300 publications was impossible, the first three sections are inspired by his Wikipedia entry for identification of his three key research themes.
Foreign financial risk management
As indicated above, Agarwal’s first two publications related to foreign financial risk management, with his articles in CJWB and MIR both discussing the difficulties of dealing with foreign subsidiary financial statements when currency values can change abruptly and unexpectedly. Agarwal proceeded to write regularly about foreign exchange risk and tactics and strategies to manage it. His most important work in this area included the following topics:
- An assessment of the three kinds of foreign exchange exposure - transactions exposure, accounting exposure (MIR, 1975; International Journal of Accounting Education and Research, 1983), and economic exposure (CWJB, 1989) – both at the individual country level and at consolidated levels, and for different time periods.
- Policies to hedge these various types of exposures, directly by buying or selling offsetting currencies in spot and futures markets, or indirectly by making appropriate offsetting operating changes (Journal of Portfolio Management, 1997, Journal of Futures Markets, 1997).
- Countertrade opportunities that allow MNCs to take money out of restricted countries (Industrial Marketing Management, 1989). This followed Aggarwal’s early work on the hazards for managers and investors of the introduction of FASB 8 within the multinational corporation context (Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance, 1978).
International capital structure
This is a topic that Aggarwal has revisited regularly, demonstrating that average levels of debt used by companies in different countries differ. It started with his work on large European companies (MIR, 1981), moving to Asian (Financial Review, 1986; Asean Economic Bulletin, 1990) and Latin American companies (Managerial Finance, 1987).
Aggarwal also investigated a wide range factors influencing the variance in the average proportion of corporate debt across national borders, including agency costs (Financial Management Association Meeting, 2003), weak external financial markets (Research in International Business & Finance, 2008), national transparency regimes (Journal of International Management & Accounting, 2008), and their level of multi-nationality (International Review of Financial Analysis, 2020).
Finally, Aggarwal also showed that financing activities by the world’s largest banks were determined more by their location (country) than by the size of the bank itself (MIR, 1982) and studied how national financing preferences and access to finance were determined by legal, cultural, and other national characteristics (Emerging Markets Review, 2009; Journal of Banking & Finance, 2009; IBR, 2010; Journal of Banking & Finance, 2012; (Research in International Business & Finance, 2014; IBR, 2018), thus contributing significantly to the literature on the importance of cultural and institutional context and country-of-origin effects in MNCs.
Emerging markets & new multinational corporations
Aggarwal was one of the first to study newly emerging MNCs outside developed Western economies, then called Third World MNCs. He studied both Indian (The Journal of Developing Areas, 1982; Economia e Politica Industriale, 2011) and Singapore Firms (Contemporary Southeast Asia, 1985), as well as the challenges that Western firms are facing from these new MNCs (Advances in International Comparative Management, 1984). He also studied the role of government-directed comparative advantage for MNCs from the newly industrialized countries India, Singapore, and South Korea (MIR, 1990). On the other side of the coin, Agarwal studied the challenges and opportunities of investing in these emerging markets (Journal of Portfolio Management, 1997; Journal of Multinational Financial Management, 2008).
Recent work: IB perennials, societal engagement, and teaching
Since the 2010s Aggarwal has focused on a wide range of topics, from IB perennials such as defining and measuring firm-level multinationality (IBR, 2011) and the relationship between board diversity and firm performance, (IBR, 2019), to emerging and highly societally engaged topics such as corporate governance for climate change (European Journal of Finance, 2012), lending to women in microfinance (IBR, 2015), and ethical issues in Finance (Wiley Encyclopaedia of Management , 2015).
Most importantly though, in the last 12 years of his publishing career, Agarwal played a very important role in shaping teaching in IB through his editorship of the Journal of Teaching for International Business (JTIB). Two highly cited full-length contributions discussed the challenges Business Schools face in developing a global mindset (JTIB, 2011) and the challenges and opportunities of Scholarship of Teaching in IB more generally (JTIB, 2011).
However, with co-editors John Goodell and later Yinglu Wu, Aggarwal also published well over 40 short, but substantive, editorials on topics as diverse as: accreditation (JTIB, 2011), study abroad (JTIB, 2011, 2015), experiential learning in IB (JTIB, 2014, 2019), learning styles (JTIB, 2015), immersive (JTIB, 2015) and active learning (JTIB, 2019), and in later pandemic and post-pandemic years online teaching (JTIB, 2020), COVID-19 challenges (JTIB, 2021), remote students (JTIB, 2022), and virtual teams (JTIB, 2023).
A recurring theme throughout the years were his many editorials on topics related to “soft skills”: global awareness (JTIB, 2012), personal leadership (JTIB, 2014), contextual richness (JTIB, 2015), cultural intelligence (JTIB, 2016), cultural differences (JTIB, 2017), and mindsets (JTIB, 2016, 2018), cross-cultural communication (JTIB, 2020), and cross-cultural competence (JTIB, 2021).
Conclusion and personal reflections
This analysis demonstrates Raj Aggarwal made very significant contributions to the field of International Business, publishing in a much wider variety of outlets (including books / chapters, handbooks, encyclopaedia, and the popular press) than is customary today. A large part of his work emphasised the impact of institutional and cultural factors on financial decisions, thus spanning two sub-disciplines of international business that are not often combined: International Finance and Cross-cultural & Comparative Management. He was one of the pioneers in this area as Finance academia was very late in considering national culture.
His interdisciplinary focus is further illustrated in his editorial on the intersection of culture and finance, published in the Journal of Corporate Finance (2016). This might also explain his emphasis on “soft skills” during his editorship of the Journal of Teaching in International Business. We were all very fortunate to have Aggarwal devote the last decade of his career to share his accumulated wisdom in his editorials for JTIB. I hope that the collated list above will lead many of us to revisit the tremendous store of knowledge in this journal. It provides considerable support for what – for many of us – is the part of our job that occupies the bulk of our time.
Personally, I enjoyed the dive into the history of publishing too. The 1975 volume of Columbia Journal of World Business showed that the journal was actively courting the advertising dollar by positioning a high proportion of its readers as being senior executive in IB. We would hardly expect this group to read the journal – or any academic IB journal beyond possibly AIB insights – now. We also learn that Business books were relatively expensive, costing up to $19.95 for a 263-page book, but popular reprints were still cheap at $1.00 for three. And that included the cost of paper and postage! The reverse is true these days, trade books have not increased that much in price, but (electronic) reprints of individual articles are being charged at the extortionate rate of $25-$50!
For younger academics who are astounded by Aggarwal’s level of productivity, please realise that in the early part of his publishing career, many journals published articles that were only 5-8 pages long and focused more on description of phenomena than theory development, quite natural for a developing field. Whereas our IB articles have become (much) longer and theory now plays a very important role, I am not sure their impact has necessarily increased to the same extent, especially with the decline in publishing work that is accessible to managers.
Finally, as someone coming from the “soft side” of International Business (International HRM, Cross-cultural Management, and Language in IB), I enjoyed learning more about Finance and its interaction with institutional and cultural contexts. I was also pleased to be reminded of the tremendous contribution the Journal of Teaching in International Business made to legitimising teaching scholarship. Although I have never had a chance to interact much with Raj, it is clear to me that we have lost we lost both a curious, versatile and imaginative academic, and a very kind-hearted colleague. Let’s all continue to capture Raj Aggarwal’s spirit of what being a good academic is all about.
Note 1: This analysis was hindered by the fact that Raj Aggarwal’s Google Scholar Profile included many publications by namesakes and stray citations. The original – nearly 500 – entries thus required considerable manual cleaning. Hence, my analysis below might not be 100% accurate. If you do find any important missing information or inaccuracies, please let me know.
Note 2: My sincere thanks to John Goodell, Omrane Guedhami, and David Reed for reviewing my first draft and contributing a few important tweaks.
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Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Thu 2 Oct 2025 14:30
Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.
