A Systematic Review of Literature and Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis of Capital Structure Issue

Abstract

Economists have been dealing with the issue of using sources of financing in business activities for more than half a century. The search for a suitable combination of equity and debt financing has led to a number of studies and later theories that deal with the issue of capital structure optimization. The authors often focus in their publications on whether the capital structure of the enterprise can be optimized or whether the business activities and the fulfilment of its main objectives are conditioned by the management of financial resources. For this reason, the issue of capital structure is constantly highly topical. The main goal of this research paper is to clarify the basic concepts associated with the question about the capital structure of enterprise. The analysis was preceded by a detailed study of the publications by identifying the most crucial research papers, countries, and authors in the Web of Science database. The term capital structure was a search keyword focused on scientific research papers published in the Web of Science database during 2010–2021. The final search result with all available information was exported and subsequently used to create the bibliometric map itself in the VOS Viewer program. The results of the bibliometric analysis show that the keywords capital structure and determinants are the two most related words using the analysis of citations of common occurrence, and the most crucial international co-author relations arose between the USA and China.