Thirty Years of Academic Finance

TL;DR

This paper analyzes three decades of academic finance literature, highlighting its growth, diversification of topics, increased team sizes, and shifts in research focus related to gender and institutional prestige.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive longitudinal analysis of the evolution of finance research, including topic coverage, author demographics, and institutional influence.

Findings

Field has expanded with more outlets and articles.

Teams have become larger and more diverse.

Articles with women focus more on social and governance topics.

Abstract

We study how the financial literature has evolved in scale, research team composition, and article topicality across 32 finance-focused academic journals from 1992 to 2021. We document that the field has vastly expanded regarding outlets and published articles. Teams have become larger, and the proportion of women participating in research has increased significantly. Using the Structural Topic Model, we identify 45 topics discussed in the literature. We investigate the topic coverage of individual journals and can identify highly specialized and generalist outlets, but our analyses reveal that most journals have covered more topics over time, thus becoming more generalist. Finally, we find that articles with at least one woman author focus more on topics related to social and governance aspects of corporate finance. We also find that teams with at least one top-tier institution scholar tend to focus more on theoretical aspects of finance.