Syndicated loans: mapping the trends, sources and intellectual evolution

Abstract

This study conducts a citation-based comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) of the syndicated loan market by identifying and recognizing the sources of knowledge-producing leading articles, journals and authors in this area. In total, we present a citation analysis of 374 articles from the Scopus database using a comprehensive list of keyword searches. We find that the importance of research using syndicated loan data has increased after the global financial crisis (GFC). It is perhaps due to the reason that the GFC was mainly a credit crisis that sparked the interest of research in this area. We identify the Journal of Financial Economics as the leading journal in terms of citation and the Journal of Banking and Finance in terms of publication count. Victoria Ivashina comes out as the leading author in terms of the citation count and Anthony Saunders in terms of publication count. We also perform a content analysis of the top 100 most cited papers and identify data characteristics, major themes, estimation techniques and empirical approaches. Our SLR provides a macro picture of research on syndicated loan studies. Finally, we provide an overview of the direction for future research.