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

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.