Capital Structure and Corporate Social Responsibility: From the Past to the Future

Abstract

Capital structure is a classic issue that has been widely studied in the last decades. Its relevance in corporate social responsibility (CSR) shows to be pertinent, but not sufficiently explored, namely in what concerns the role of capital structure on CSR. Based on a bibliometric analysis from the Scopus database for the period from 2010 and February 2023, the authors look to the past to follow the evolution of scientific production and trends on capital structure and CSR over the last decades and then try to understand in which direction the research in these subjects is moving. The results show the dominance of documents on capital structure and CSR in the period 2020-2022. The main conclusions about the studies analyzed is that companies with high levels of indebtedness face lower capacity to invest in CSR activities and firms with more CSR activities are more likely to use less debt. However, the last conclusion in not consensual. This study offers an overview of the state of the art, contributing to understanding the relationship between CSR and capital structure and identifying several avenues for future research.