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Finance continuously evolves as the technological innovation progresses in the society. Numerous prior studies have discussed emerging financial services due to this innovation. However, limited scholarly work has evaluated the trends and state of the art of financial innovation. Therefore, this study aims to review recent literature on financial innovation by using a bibliometric and content-analysis approach.

Documents for this study are sampled from financial innovation, a journal focusing on recent innovations in finance. A total of 354 peer-reviewed articles published in eight years (2015–2022) are first examined and mapped using the bibliometrix package in RStudio software. Furthermore, content analysis was performed to investigate the adopted research methods and types, and produce directions for future studies.

The trend of financial innovation research kept increasing, with China as the leader in publication quantity, affiliation productivity and paper citation acquisition. Topics related to “FinTech,” “Bitcoin” and “Covid-19” have been the most discussed topics by financial innovation researchers. FinTech and Bitcoin studies are expected to grow in emerging countries like China, India and Pakistan. The study also indicates that most financial innovation studies use quantitative research methods and are categorized as empirical papers.

This study contributes to the finance literature by comprehensively evaluating current research on financial innovation using one specific journal in the field. Also, this study examines financial innovation literature using different approaches from previous bibliometric financial innovation studies.

This paper aims to examine the effects of corporate governance mechanisms (board chairman independence, board independent director meeting attendance, audit committee size and audit committee meetings) on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) and its individual component disclosures of listed firms in Saudi Arabia.

The study used unbalanced panel data obtained from the Bloomberg data set over 11 years, from 2010 to 2020.

The findings indicate that board chairman independence (BCI) and audit committee size (AC size) have a significant negative and positive association with ESG disclosure, respectively. However, the results show that board independent director meeting attendance (BIMA) and audit committee meetings (AC meetings) do not significantly influence ESG disclosure. Regarding the individual dimensions (components), the results show that only BIMA has a significant negative association with environmental disclosure. Besides, only BCI and AC meetings have a significant positive association with social disclosure. Also, only BIMA and AC size have a significant positive and negative relationship with governance disclosure, respectively.

The study used a sample of 29 listed companies in Saudi Arabia. Each firm has at least four years of ESG disclosures. Besides, the paper considered only four corporate governance attributes, comprising two each for the board and audit committee.

The results provide insights to regulators, boards of directors, managers and investors to enhance ESG and its components’ reporting toward the sustainable operations and better performance of Saudi firms.

This study is among the few that provide empirical evidence on how some essential corporate governance attributes that have not been given adequate attention by prior studies (board chairman independence, board independent directors’ meeting attendance, audit committee size and audit committee meetings) influence not only ESG reporting as a whole but also its individual dimensions (components).