ASSET PRICING, MARKET INTEGRATION, AND CONTAGION: A BIBLIOMETRIC PERSPECTIVE

This paper provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the existing literature concerning the broader asset pricing literature, with a particular focus on the topics of market integration, financial contagion, risk transmission, and institutional quality across developed, emerging, and frontier financial markets. Using a large bibliographic database and a controlled thesaurus-based keyword harmonization procedure, the study maps the intellectual structure, thematic evolution, and clustering of the research within the literature over the period 1980 2025. The analysis reveals that asset pricing research has expanded substantially over the past decades, yet it remains highly fragmented across several independent research streams. Multifactor asset pricing models, financial integration and globalization, volatility spillovers and contagion, ESG-related risk, and emerging and frontier market studies are shown to evolve largely in isolation from one another. Bibliometric evidence suggests that asset pricing studies primarily focus on factor construction and model performance, while integration and contagion are predominantly viewed as financial stability or macroeconomic elements, with limited consideration given to their implications for asset pricing. Similarly, ESG-related research forms a rapidly growing but thematically segmented cluster, and market classifications are typically employed as descriptive categories rather than as structural dimensions of pricing dynamics. By adopting a comprehensive framework, this paper complements the existing literature by explicitly linking these segmented research domains and by documenting how their thematic trajectories overlap, diverge, and evolve in response to major economic events and structural changes in global financial markets. The findings acknowledge the need for more integrated research approaches that jointly consider asset pricing, market integration, contagion mechanisms, and institutional context, and they provide a structured foundation for future empirical and policy oriented investigations in globally interconnected financial systems.