Sustainable Development, ESG and Capital Structure: A Bibliometric Review and Research Agenda

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a comprehensive map of the literature on sustainability and capital structure, identifying key themes, gaps, and future research directions.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights into how ESG considerations are increasingly integrated into financing decisions and debt-related risk assessment.

🏛政策担当者:Emphasizes the growing financial materiality of sustainability, supporting the case for mandatory ESG disclosure and green finance policies.

Sustainability considerations increasingly shape financial strategy, yet their integration into capital structure decisions remains fragmented and conceptually heterogeneous across the literature. This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of research at the intersection of sustainability and capital structure within corporate governance. The paper systematically examines publication trends, leading journals, influential authors, country‐level contributions and international collaboration patterns. Moving beyond a traditional narrative literature review, the analysis employs cocitation analysis, keyword co‐occurrence networks and thematic mapping to uncover the field's intellectual structure and evolution of the field. The analysis shows a pronounced acceleration in scholarly output after 2010, reflecting the growing recognition of sustainability as a financially material factor in corporate decision‐making. While early contributions were dispersed across general finance and management outlets, recent research has consolidated around sustainability‐, governance‐ and strategy‐oriented journals. Although the United States and the United Kingdom remain influential in terms of citation impact, the field has become increasingly global. Thematic and cocitation analyses further reveal a conceptual shift: Early legitimacy‐ and CSR‐focused perspectives are progressively complemented by financially grounded research emphasizing ESG disclosure quality, governance mechanisms, risk management and financing costs. The strong centrality of debt‐related themes reflects a structural asymmetry in the literature, indicating that sustainability is predominantly interpreted through a creditor‐oriented risk lens. Overall, the study documents the maturation of sustainability and capital structure research into a structured and globally embedded field and reframes sustainability as a core financial and governance mechanism shaping corporate financing decisions, while offering a research agenda for future work.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.70687first seen 2026-05-15 21:12:22 · last seen 2026-06-16 05:18:05