What does the literature say about business groups and pyramidal ownership in the period of 1960-2018?

This paper aims to analyze the results of the research in pyramidal structures within the scope of the business groups, based on a systematic literature review. The research was conducted on two large-scale journals databases (Web of Science and Scopus), using VOSviewer, HistCite™, and Iramuteq software. The textual corpus is consisting of 65 articles and 137 authors and co-authors. Bae et al. (2002) and Almeida and Wolfenzon (2006) are the most influential for the research fields. We infer as a conceptual framework that searches in pyramidal structures are contained in the field of business groups since they represent a form of organization and representation of ownership and control. We identify as a theoretical gap the analysis of the political connections and the social role. Thus, the contributions are in the sense of presenting a panorama on the themes, supporting future researches.