Evolving alliance between corporate environmental performance and financial performance: A bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review

Abstract

This study aims to overview the existing literature, knowledge framework, and intellectual structure mapping in the field of corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) by employing a bibliometric analysis approach to selected 311 papers sourced from the Scopus database between 1994 and 2022. It presents the publication growth, influential sources, productive authors, and collaboration index of countries using Biblioshiny software. Stringent regulatory regime and stakeholders' pressure followed by a growing trend of publication motivated us to comprehend the evolving facets of the relationship using co‐citation analysis followed by a systematic literature review using coupling analysis which identified five research themes as CEP–CFP relationships—facets, strategies and dimensions, and methodological choices during the initial phase of 1994–2014; and green innovation and corporate sustainability practices, environmental disclosure and environmental responsibility, and green development behavior and practices during 2015–2022. From the insights congregated from research themes, the study discusses prominent developments and provides future research directions to further enrich the field of CEP and CFP. Our findings provide various global regulatory frameworks, government, policymakers, and firm managers the need to explore the dynamic factors while formulating the strategic environmental policy and how it contributes to the financial performance of the firms.

Environmental regulation and corporate environmental performance: A bibliometric analysis

“…We categorized the literature using keywords plus, with 2014 and 2019 as time points and finally generated Figure 13 with the help of the R package. The year 2014 was chosen because environmental regulation and supervision became particularly stringent from 2015 onwards, while 2019 was picked because of the global outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic from 2020 onwards, both of which will have a huge impact on ER and CEP research (Chowdhury et al, 2023). The evolution of themes is implemented through three phases: phase 1 (2002-2014), phase 2 (2015-2019), and phase 3 (2020-2023).…”