Recent research in hospitality financial management

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize published contemporary hospitality financial management research from 1998 through 2009 and provide future research directions. Design/methodology/approach: The authors began their initial literature search by entering into the ABI/INFORM database via ProQuest 19 pre-identified keywords (i.e. debt, financing, ownership) related to the major functions of financial management, namely investing, financing, and dividend decisions, as well as commonly indexed keywords in hospitality finance research. The paper then expanded the authors' literature list through the reference lists of the studies that they initially identified. The authors limited their search to published studies between 1998 and 2009 and within hospitality journals written in English. Findings: The paper identifies 98 published papers that represented the major work and efforts in expanding the body of knowledge in both the theoretical and practical perspectives of hospitality financial management. The major categories of papers include hospitality financing, investing, dividend policy, financial condition, and performance. Areas that warrant further investigation are noted throughout the paper. Research limitations/implications: The papers review provides academics and practitioners an overview of the updated body of knowledge in the field and suggests the need for further in-depth research to extend the literature and prompt better financial decision making for practitioners. Originality/value: Since Harris and Brown's and Atkinson and Jones's reviews of past hospitality accounting and finance studies which mostly focused on the former, hospitality financial management research alone has grown noticeably in terms of diverse topics and sophistication of methodologies. To the authors' knowledge, no updated reviews that focus solely on hospitality finance research have been published in the last 12 years, and the need for such a task motivated them to conduct a review of recent research on this topic.