LITERATURE REVIEW ON SPECIFIC TYPES OF RISK FACED BY FIRMS

Abstract

This contribution presents a literature review focused on four types of risk that firms may face during their operation, namely, operational risk, supply chain risk, strategic risk, and enterprise risk. The applied methodology consisted of an online search of databases regarding scientific documents in English, published in different journals; the search was based on several keywords/strings (themes) that had to be included just as in the article title. The number of surveyed papers by theme showed a variation from 40 to 600 and the number of citations of those papers showed a wider variation from 2 to 918. Selected articles from the four themes were analyzed and the first five with more citations were read in full to make a synopsis of each article. However, to reduce the length of the current paper, only two synopses of each theme were explicitly included here. Overall, the findings show that firm’s risks are an important subject for academic researchers, managers and stakeholders, for risky situations can occur and sometimes lead to very heavy losses. A few research gaps were identified, either the lack of quantitative models for the assessment and management of enterprises’ risks, or insufficient practical support/expertise, namely through case studies and/or well-designed surveys. The review ends with the limitations and contributions of the study.