The Impact of ESG Policies on Firm Value: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature

The present study analyzes how the significant expansion of the interest in ESG matters, from both an institutional point of view but especially an academic one, has happened in parallel with the expansion of academic concerns in this field and of dedicated research. This has led to the creation of certain trends, themes and key domains, but in the same measure it has also led to highlighting some areas relevant to ESG topics, but less covered by scientific activity. The dataset used in the bibliometric analysis was based on a series of articles extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database, through the application of searches that aimed to highlight articles related to specific ESG terms and especially to the correlation of these with firm value. These articles were filtered through the PRISMA methodology. After applying relevant selection criteria and eliminating results that did not contain relevant articles, we reached a total of 1,032 articles published between the years 2021 and 2026. With the help of VOSViewer we combined certain performance indicators of these articles (trends, productivity and citation impact) with science mapping techniques, including here co-authorship analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and bibliographic coupling. The results indicate the presence of well-outlined thematic clusters centered around the key concepts of ESG. Other domains identified indicate the presence of the key concepts of corporate governance and ESG risks. At the same time, the analysis found that there is a significant fragmentation resulting of the ESG indicators and of the ESG frameworks at international level. Thus, the conclusion of the present study underlines the fact that bibliometric analysis instruments are useful both in identifying the consolidation tendencies of the specialized literature in the ESG domain through the synthesis of recent developments, but also in identifying themes and tendencies of future researches like the standardization of ESG frameworks.