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

ABSTRACT 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.