Bibliometric study on asset pricing

Purpose - This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of asset pricing research and identifies the general research trends in the area. The study also aims to provide future direction to the researchers in the area of asset pricing. Design/methodology/approach - The study uses bibliometric analysis techniques to achieve the stated purpose. The study covers 3,007 articles published in the top 50 finance and economics journals, accessed from the Scopus database for a period of 47 years (1973–2020). After initial searching for “asset pricing” as the main keyword in “title, abstract, keywords”, the database yields 6,583 articles. This number further reduces to 3,007 articles when the search is restricted to research and review articles published in the top 50 peer-reviewed journals. Findings - The tabular and pictorial representation obtained from the analysis exhibit that asset pricing is an extensively researched area; however, a sudden rise in the number of publications (242) observed for 2019 demonstrates a growing interest amongst researchers. Further, affiliation statistics indicate that the volume of research is mainly concentrated in the USA and other developed nations; hence it opens vistas for the exploration of risk-return dynamics in the context of emerging markets. Originality/value - The work presents an exhaustive and comprehensive review along with potential research implications. The present study reconciles various contradictory views of the prior studies under asset pricing such as risk-return trade-off, low-risk anomaly and provides the researchers with potential research gaps.