We examine the relative scientific impact of new research in finance and find it declined steadily during the period 2002 to 2019, more than 60% cumulatively, reaching the lowest level in four decades. We also find declining incidence of “home-run” papers during this period. In contrast, the papers published in the period 1985 to 1999 have strong initial and long-lasting impact collectively. Comparisons to other disciplines, including economics, show that the proliferation of research that advance the finance field only marginally in the past two decades is not typical across research fields. Our findings support the necessity to remove the obstacles hindering innovative research and scientific progress in finance that many prolific researchers and editors of leading journals indicate.
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We thank the editor Ivo Welch, an anonymous referee, Campbell Harvey, Stavros Panageas, Mohammad Arzaghi, Conrado Garcia-Gómez, the participants in the research seminar organized by the Economics and Finance Departments at American University of Sharjah on February 25th, 2020, the participants in the corporate finance session of the 33rd EBES Conference—Madrid (online)—October 2020, David Feldman and the participants in the Finance Symposium, Chania, Crete (online)—August 2021. We thank very much Stavros Panageas for sharing the data of his presentation at the 2019 meeting of the Northern Finance Association (Panageas, 2019). The authors also appreciate the excellent research assistance of Sadath Ali, Ali Bashir, Hajar El Mouttaqui, and Rebecca Robert-Bello.
Zantout Z, Gleason K, Systla A (2025), "The Diminishing Scientific Impact of New Research in Finance". Critical Finance Review, Vol. 14 No. 4 pp. 621–698, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/104.00000170
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