Frontiers and Foundations: Insights From the Most‐Cited Finance Papers, 2021–2026

We examine the 100 most‐cited papers published in JF, JFE, RFS, JFQA, and RoF from January 2021 through May 2026 to take stock of recent finance research. ESG and climate finance dominate the citation record, but the single most‐cited paper is a critique of staggered difference‐in‐differences. Finance has moved into new topics, and methods papers have raised the standards for applied empirical work. Machine learning and natural language processing have entered the field mostly as tools for measuring things that used to be hard to observe, not as research agendas in their own right. We close on five areas where the next round of work is likely to concentrate: carbon pricing, ESG additionality, retail investor welfare, spatial finance, and AI‐driven information production.