Beyond Corporate Responsibility: Reassessing the Financial Implications of Sustainability for Dividend Policy (Perspectives in Social Sciences)

Summary

• The study combines a bibliometric analysis and critical review of 150 peer-reviewed Scopus articles published between 2005 and 2025.p.1
• Alshehhi et al. meta-analysis of 132 studies finds that 78% report positive effects of sustainability on financial performance.p.4
• The dataset averages 26.08 citations per document across 98 journals, with 32.9% international co-authorship.p.10
• The average number of co-authors per document is 2.74.p.10
• China leads with 29 publications, followed by the United States with 18.p.15
• The most productive journal is the Journal of Cleaner Production with 7 publications.p.13

Key insights

1. Corporate sustainability generally supports higher dividends, but the positive impact is conditional rather than universal.p.19
2. Sustainability activities are costly and may reduce free cash flow available for dividend distribution.p.7
3. Externally verifiable initiatives such as eco-labelling and green bonds show more consistent positive associations with dividends than broad ESG scores.p.19
4. Contradictory findings are best explained by an ESG measurement problem rather than disagreement over facts.p.4
5. Family ownership has a positive moderating role on the CSR-dividend link in Turkey but a negative one in Malaysia.p.7
6. Dividend policy appears as a minor peripheral node in the keyword network, revealing a research gap.p.17
7. Dividend policy, corporate governance and CSR are basic themes that are central but not fully developed.p.18