From ESG Disclosure to Corporate Financial Performance: A Bibliometric, Systematic Literature Review and LDA-Based Topic Modelling Analysis

• Shiv Bansal

  Author

• Pallavi Rana

  Author

This study maps the intellectual, social and conceptual structure of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure–financial performance literature and identifies the latent thematic streams that underlie it. A Scopus-indexed corpus of 621 peer-reviewed articles, reviews and conference papers (2001–2026) was retrieved through a Boolean title-abstract-keyword search combining ESG/environmental/social/governance disclosure terms with financial-, firm- and corporate-performance terms, restricted to Business, Economics and Social Sciences literatures and screened through a PRISMA-consistent multi-stage filtering protocol (845 → 621 records). Bibliometric performance and science-mapping analysis (VOSviewer) was combined with a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model fitted on document abstracts to complement the manual systematic literature review (SLR). The corpus has accumulated 24,801 citations (mean = 39.94 per document; dataset h-index = 77), with publication output accelerating sharply after 2020 and peaking in 2024–2025. Author, country and citation network analyses reveal a fragmented co-authorship structure dominated by regionally clustered teams (India, the Gulf Cooperation Council, China and Southeast Asia) connected through a small number of high-degree bridging countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Italy), while the co-citation network is organised around three canonical reference clusters anchored respectively in stakeholder/legitimacy theory (Freeman, Deegan, Gray), agency/disclosure economics (Jensen and Meckling, Healy and Palepu-type work) and ESG-performance measurement (Serafeim, Friedman, Alareeni, Buallay). The seven-topic LDA solution recovers (i) disclosure practices, board attributes and CSR reporting; (ii) bibliometric/literature-review studies of sustainability reporting; (iii) institutional and regulatory drivers of ESG transparency; (iv) the quantitative ESG–financial-performance nexus built around ROA/ROE/Tobin's Q; (v) governance quality, ownership structure and greenwashing; (vi) moderators, emerging-market context and endogeneity-robust estimation; and (vii) green innovation, carbon performance and climate disclosure — with topics (iii), (vi) and (vii) growing fastest since 2023. The systematic review of theories, variables, mediators/moderators and methods shows a field still dominated by agency-, stakeholder- and legitimacy-theoretic panel-regression designs using accounting-based performance measures, with persistent gaps in causal identification, cross-country comparability of ESG scores, and the financial-performance consequences of disclosure *quality* rather than *quantity*. A table of the 150 most-cited and most representative studies is provided as a reference base for future primary research and meta-analytic work.

1. Shiv Bansal

   Department of Commerce, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India 

2. Pallavi Rana

   Department of Commerce, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

• PDF

Copyright (c) 2026 Package Printing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

All articles published are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence.