Subfield · Finance
Most cited papers in Finance
What are the most cited papers in Finance?
The most cited paper in Finance is "Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure" (Michael C. Jensen, William H. Meckling, 1976), with 72,158 citations. Next come "Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds" (28,079) and "Distribution of the Estimators for Autoregressive Time Series with a Unit Root" (23,250).
Showing 50 of 99 papers. Every paper with more than 3,739 citations is listed.
| # | Paper | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure Michael C. Jensen, William H. Meckling · Journal of Financial Economics | Oct 1976 | 72,158 |
| 2 | Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds Eugene F. Fama, Kenneth R. French · Journal of Financial Economics | Feb 1993 | 28,079 |
| 3 | Distribution of the Estimators for Autoregressive Time Series with a Unit Root David Alan Dickey, Wayne Arthur Fuller · Journal of the American Statistical Association | Jun 1979 | 23,250 |
| 4 | Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity Tim Bollerslev · Journal of Econometrics | Apr 1986 | 22,677 |
| 5 | Corporate financing and investment decisions when firms have information that investors do not have Stewart C. Myers, Nicholas S. Majluf · Journal of Financial Economics | Jun 1984 | 19,433 |
| 6 | Law and Finance Rafael La Porta, Florencio López‐de‐Silanes, Andrei Shleifer et al. · Journal of Political Economy | Dec 1998 | 18,396 |
| 7 | Testing for a unit root in time series regression Peter C.B. Phillips, Pierre Perrón · Biometrika | 1988 | 18,270 |
| 8 | Cancer statistics in China, 2015 Wanqing Chen, Rongshou Zheng, Peter D. Baade et al. · CA A Cancer Journal for Clinicians | 25 Jan 2016 | 18,026 |
| 9 | CAPITAL ASSET PRICES: A THEORY OF MARKET EQUILIBRIUM UNDER CONDITIONS OF RISK* William F. Sharpe · The Journal of Finance | Sep 1964 | 17,476 |
| 10 | Statistical analysis of cointegration vectors Søren Johansen · Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control | Jun 1988 | 16,966 |
| 11 | Testing for unit roots in heterogeneous panels Kyung So Im, M. Hashem Pesaran, Yongcheol Shin · Journal of Econometrics | 30 Apr 2003 | 15,285 |
| 12 | The Cross‐Section of Expected Stock Returns Eugene F. Fama, Kenneth R. French · The Journal of Finance | Jun 1992 | 15,123 |
| 13 | Dynamic capabilities: what are they? Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Jeffrey A. Martin · Strategic Management Journal | 2000 | 14,792 |
| 14 | MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION AND INFERENCE ON COINTEGRATION — WITH APPLICATIONS TO THE DEMAND FOR MONEY Søren Johansen, Katarina Jusélius · Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics | May 1990 | 14,204 |
| 15 | Determinants of corporate borrowing Stewart C. Myers · Journal of Financial Economics | Nov 1977 | 13,558 |
| 16 | Testing the null hypothesis of stationarity against the alternative of a unit root Denis Kwiatkowski, Peter C.B. Phillips, Peter Schmidt et al. · Journal of Econometrics | Oct 1992 | 12,778 |
| 17 | Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Sheridan D. Titman · The Journal of Finance | Mar 1993 | 11,668 |
| 18 | Estimating Standard Errors in Finance Panel Data Sets: Comparing Approaches Mitchell A. Petersen · Review of Financial Studies | 3 Jun 2008 | 11,464 |
| 19 | ON THE PRICING OF CORPORATE DEBT: THE RISK STRUCTURE OF INTEREST RATES* Robert C. Merton · The Journal of Finance | May 1974 | 11,053 |
| 20 | Illiquidity and stock returns: cross-section and time-series effects Yakov Amihud · Journal of Financial Markets | 2002 | 10,623 |
| 21 | Legal Determinants of External Finance RAFAEL LA PORTA, Florencio López‐de‐Silanes, Andrei Shleifer et al. · The Journal of Finance | Jul 1997 | 10,059 |
| 22 | Bank Runs, Deposit Insurance, and Liquidity Douglas W. Diamond, Philip H. Dybvig · Journal of Political Economy | Jun 1983 | 9,677 |
| 23 | A Closed-Form Solution for Options with Stochastic Volatility with Applications to Bond and Currency Options Steven L. Heston · Review of Financial Studies | Apr 1993 | 9,255 |
| 24 | Coherent Measures of Risk Philippe Artzner, Freddy Delbaen, Jean‐Marc Eber et al. · Mathematical Finance | Jul 1999 | 9,137 |
| 25 | On the Relation between the Expected Value and the Volatility of the Nominal Excess Return on Stocks Lawrence R. Glosten, Ravi Jagannathan, David Edward Runkle · The Journal of Finance | Dec 1993 | 8,790 |
| 26 | Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring Douglas W. Diamond · The Review of Economic Studies | Jul 1984 | 8,655 |
| 27 | Strategic assets and organizational rent Raphael H Amit, Paul J. H. Schoemaker · Strategic Management Journal | 1993 | 8,412 |
| 28 | A five-factor asset pricing model Eugene F. Fama, Kenneth R. French · Journal of Financial Economics | 29 Oct 2014 | 8,118 |
| 29 | The Capital Structure Puzzle Stewart C. Myers · The Journal of Finance | Jul 1984 | 7,625 |
| 30 | Theory of rational option pricing Robert C. Merton · WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks | Jul 2005 | 7,430 |
| 31 | Does the Stock Market Overreact? Werner F. M. De Bondt, Richard H. Thaler · The Journal of Finance | Jul 1985 | 7,335 |
| 32 | Dynamic Conditional Correlation Robert F. Engle · Journal of Business and Economic Statistics | Jul 2002 | 7,250 |
| 33 | The arbitrage theory of capital asset pricing Stephen A. Ross · Journal of Economic Theory | Dec 1976 | 7,226 |
| 34 | Management ownership and market valuation Randall K Morck, Andrei Shleifer, Robert W. Vishny · Journal of Financial Economics | 1988 | 7,113 |
| 35 | Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations Ziad Obermeyer, Brian W. Powers, Christine Vogeli et al. · Science | 24 Oct 2019 | 7,007 |
| 36 | Do Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivities Provide Useful Measures of Financing Constraints? S. N. Kaplan, Luigi Zingales · The Quarterly Journal of Economics | Feb 1997 | 6,923 |
| 37 | The economic implications of corporate financial reporting John Robert Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, Shiva Rajgopal · Journal of Accounting and Economics | 16 Sep 2005 | 6,759 |
| 38 | PANEL COINTEGRATION: ASYMPTOTIC AND FINITE SAMPLE PROPERTIES OF POOLED TIME SERIES TESTS WITH AN APPLICATION TO THE PPP HYPOTHESIS Peter L. Pedroni · Econometric Theory | Jun 2004 | 6,683 |
| 39 | Using daily stock returns Stephen J. Brown, Jerold B. Warner · Journal of Financial Economics | Mar 1985 | 6,673 |
| 40 | Multifactor Explanations of Asset Pricing Anomalies Eugene F. Fama, Kenneth R. French · The Journal of Finance | Mar 1996 | 6,552 |
| 41 | Bid, ask and transaction prices in a specialist market with heterogeneously informed traders Lawrence R. Glosten, Paul Milgrom · Journal of Financial Economics | Mar 1985 | 6,500 |
| 42 | Investor protection and corporate governance Rafael La Porta, Florencio López‐de‐Silanes, Andrei Shleifer et al. · Journal of Financial Economics | 2000 | 6,360 |
| 43 | Investor Sentiment and the Cross‐Section of Stock Returns Malcolm P. Baker, Jeffrey A. Wurgler · The Journal of Finance | Aug 2006 | 6,313 |
| 44 | An equilibrium characterization of the term structure Oldrich Alfons Vasicek · Journal of Financial Economics | Nov 1977 | 6,305 |
| 45 | Industry costs of equity Eugene F. Fama, Kenneth R. French · Journal of Financial Economics | Feb 1997 | 6,264 |
| 46 | Option pricing: A simplified approach John C. Cox, Stephen A. Ross, Mark Rubinstein · Journal of Financial Economics | Sep 1979 | 6,227 |
| 47 | Optimum consumption and portfolio rules in a continuous-time model Robert C. Merton · Journal of Economic Theory | Dec 1971 | 6,223 |
| 48 | The relationship between return and market value of common stocks Rolf W. Banz · Journal of Financial Economics | Mar 1981 | 6,135 |
| 49 | Better to give than to receive: Predictive directional measurement of volatility spillovers Francis X. Diebold, Kamil Yılmaz · International Journal of Forecasting | 26 May 2011 | 5,816 |
| 50 | The equity premium: A puzzle Rajnish Mehra, Edward C. Prescott · Journal of Monetary Economics | Mar 1985 | 5,789 |
Citations are OpenAlex's own counts, from its 2026-09-23 snapshot, so the ranking can differ from Google Scholar or Web of Science. A paper is listed for a field when OpenAlex files it under one of the field's topics; retracted papers and papers whose citation count cannot be traced to citing works are left out, and a preprint and the article it became are shown once. Release dates are OpenAlex's: where a source gave only a month or a year, that is what is shown. How the lists are chosen.