Missing finance in social impact bond research? A bibliometric overview between past and future research

Abstract

This paper provides a bibliometric review of 156 articles published between 2011 and 2021 on social impact bonds (SIBs). We identified five research streams, namely studies that: (i) place the origins of SIBs in the neo‐liberalism framework; (ii) consider SIBs as an evolution of the new public management approach; (iii) focus on conceptualizing SIBs as an impact investment approach rooted in the social finance landscape; (iv) look at SIBs as a funding source for social entrepreneurship; and (v) detect an emerging phenomenon labeled as sustainable financial partnerships for the SDGs. Our results suggest that the current literature is strongly based on those that we have defined as a sort of UK influence, which is dominating the scientific perspective and the current use of SIBs, and that there is still less “finance‐based” research in this field. We conclude by proposing areas for future research.

CSR research in corporate finance: a comment on Gillan et al., “firms and social responsibility: a review of ESG and CSR research in corporate finance”

“…For example, in their bibliometric analysis of climate finance research, Carè and Weber (2023a), who depict such research as being “critical for environmental science, law, political science and international relations” but “overlooked by finance journals” (p. 4), characterise it as an “interdisciplinary research topic” (p. 14). In the particular case of social impact bonds research, Carè et al (2023) relate the apparent lack of interest in such topic by mainstream finance journals to the methodological approaches used in this type of research (with many studies using a theoretical approach and many others using a case study methodology).…”

“…This dearth of methodological variety and lack of interdisciplinarity and their consequences are emphasised by some literature reviews on CSR-related topics such as climate finance, social finance and social impact bonds (Carè and Weber, 2023a, 2023b; Carè et al , 2023; Diaz-Rainey et al , 2017). Mainstream finance research can be depicted as “essentially a mono method” endeavour “which is ill-suited to tackling forward-looking challenges arising from dynamic system change” (Diaz-Rainey et al , 2017, p. 254).…”