Financial Performance of Housing Finance Companies in India: A Bibliometric Analysis and PRISMA-Based Systematic Literature Review (2000–2026)

Author

Bhummannagari Suresh Babu, Dr. G Haranath


Abstract

 Purpose: Housing Finance Companies (HFCs) have long occupied a systemically significant, if under-mapped, position in India's financial system, and were formally reclassified as a category of Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) when their regulation transferred from the National Housing Bank to the Reserve Bank of India in August 2019. Despite more than two decades of academic attention, no study has systematically mapped the intellectual structure of the literature on Indian HFC financial performance. This paper addresses that gap.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Following a PRISMA-based protocol, 1,227 records were identified from Lens.org using a search string combining housing-finance, financial-performance and India-related terms. Sequential screening by time span (2000–2026), document type (journal articles only), and subject category (Business, Economics, Finance, Financial System, Financial Crisis) yielded a final corpus of 513 articles. This corpus was analysed using the bibliometrix R-package and its Biblioshiny interface to characterise productivity trends, source and author impact (including Bradford's and Lotka's Laws), keyword structure, and thematic composition via a centrality–density strategic map.

Findings: Scientific production grew through three successive waves associated with major macro-financial events, reaching a series peak of 42 articles in 2020. The field's source base is widely scattered (a Bradford core of 29 sources against 316 peripheral sources) and its author base highly skewed toward single-publication contributors (Lotka's Law β = 4.24, R² = 0.9954). The thematic map shows the field's most developed ("motor") themes to be macro-financial and cross-country in character — housing finance/banks/GDP, financial intermediation and the global financial crisis, monetary policy, and corporate governance — while India-specific, affordability-oriented HFC research ("affordable housing/India/low-cost housing") occupies the map's least-developed, emerging-or-declining quadrant.

Originality/Value: This is the first PRISMA-guided bibliometric analysis of the Indian housing-finance-company financial-performance literature. Its central finding — that affordability-focused, firm-level Indian HFC research remains thematically underdeveloped relative to the field's macro-financial "motor" themes — directly parallels, and extends into the housing-finance sub-segment, the ESG-integration and AI-risk-analytics gaps recently identified for the broader Indian NBFC literature, providing a concrete, evidence-based research agenda for scholars, regulators, and HFC practitioners.


Keywords

housing finance companies; financial performance; India; bibliometric analysis; PRISMA; systematic literature review; Bradford's Law; Lotka's Law; thematic map; NBFC; affordable housing; Biblioshiny



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References


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