Corporate Governance Characteristics and Involvement in ESG Activities : Current Trends and Research Directions

Corporate governance characteristics represent a critical element that affects firms’ outcomes. During the last two decades, researchers have investigated the link between different governance characteristics and firms’ involvement in ESG activities. This paper provides a structured literature review on the topic with a focus on papers published in accounting and finance journals. The corpus comprises 180 academic papers from two ranked journal lists, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) and the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC). Our analysis combines a structured literature review with citation analysis, topic-modelling using a Machine Learning (ML) approach, and a manual review of selected articles. Our unique combined approach towards conducting a literature review allows us to come up with the key research topics in the area, their deep analysis and identification of the current and future research trends. A review of corporate governance and ESG literature suggests a shift towards a more strategic and practically oriented papers