Corporate social responsibility disclosures and earnings management: a bibliometric analysis

The objective of the study is to apprehend and explore the emerging themes in the existing literature about the ‘Corporate Social Responsibility disclosures (CSR)’ and ‘Earnings Management (EM)’ relationship. It employs a combination of bibliographic techniques such as author, country, keyword, cluster, citation analysis and bibliographic coupling on the data captured from Scopus and Web of Science indexed journals. CSR and EM are niche research field since 2014, where the non-western researchers are dominating. The major keywords are corporate governance, discretionary accruals, CSR and real earnings management. Most of the studies are non-collaborative in nature. The study identified three major clusters which focus on three different aspects of the relationship between CSR and EM. These aspects are: reducing information asymmetry, meeting stakeholders’ expectations and role of corporate governance and other institutional factors. The study visualizes the past, present, and future of research for CSR disclosures and EM by re-examining, unfolding and summarizing the overall knowledge, knowledge gaps, progress and mapping of the themes emerging from past studies. Therefore, the study provides a one-stop overview on the topic to interested researchers and other stakeholders such as regulators and corporate practitioners.