Documents financialisation 88 results

"Using the rise of the Chinese ‘shareholding state' as an example, this article attempts to extend the study of financialization from the economy to the state. It documents a historical and institutional process in which the Chinese state refashioned itself as a shareholder and institutional investor in the economy and resorted to financial means to manage its ownership, assets and public investments. I demonstrate that financialization of economic management in the Chinese state contain three processes: the introduction of shareholder values by the state to managing its asset, the expansion of state asset management bodies and the provision of structured investment vehicles by these institutions to fund fixed asset investment. By uncovering the mutually leveraging effect between sovereign power and finance, this study illustrates a politically endogenous model for the rise of finance in state-directed economies."

"In recent decades, financialization has significantly restructured American capitalism. Social scientists have offered several accounts to explain financial markets' ascendance, but this work often portrays financialization as a totalizing force and is conducted within divergent theoretical paradigms—political economy and neo-institutionalism—with few attempts to bridge these differences. Accordingly, we risk talking past each other while failing to identify where financialization occurs. I address these issues with a unique panel data set, panel analysis and with a focus on identifying the meso-level determinants of financialization. I do so with a substantively important industry that exemplifies the global, flexible and competitive characteristics of neoliberal capitalism. I argue that the propensity to financialize rests significantly upon firms' productive roles, meaning we cannot understand financialization without understanding production—global production networks in particular. This is also a call for researchers to explore financialization's multifaceted character and to develop a more analytically rigorous research agenda."

"Using firm-level data for the period 2004 to 2013, this article examines the connection between the financialization of French corporations and functional income distribution in the non-finance sector of the economy. Financialization of French non-financial corporations has increased their dependence on earnings through financial channels, and diminished labor bargaining power in income distribution. We examine the effects of these financial revenues on wage share using a panel data model of 6980 French non-financial firms. We conclude that increased dependence on financial profits is likely to decrease wage share in non-financial corporations. Moreover, this variable is more influential in our model than the other variables usually identified by the literature as determinants of functional income distribution, such as trade openness or labor market institutions. Of the determinants traditionally emphasized by the literature, only technological change has a greater impact than financialization."

"Since the early 2000s, scholars from a variety of disciplines have used the concept of financialization to describe a host of structural changes in the advanced political economies. Studies of financialization interrogate how an increasingly autonomous realm of global finance has altered the underlying logics of the industrial economy and the inner workings of democratic society. This paper evaluates the insights of more than a decade of scholarship on financialization. Three approaches will be discussed: the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life. It is argued that a deeper understanding of financialization will lead to a better understanding of organized interests, the politics of the welfare state, and processes of institutional change."

"This paper presents systematic empirical evidence for the financialization of the US economy in the post-1970s period. While numerous researchers have noted the increasing salience of finance, there have been few systematic attempts to consider what this shift means for the nature of the economy, considered broadly. In large part, this omission reflects the considerable methodological difficulties associated with using national economic data to assess the rise of finance as a macro-level phenomenon shaping patterns of accumulation in the US economy. The paper develops two discrete measures of financialization and applies these measures to postwar US economic data in order to determine if, and to what extent, the US economy is becoming financialized. The paper concludes by considering some of the implications of financialization for two areas of ongoing debate in the social sciences: (1) the question of who controls the modern corporation; and (2) the controversy surrounding the extent to which globalization has eroded the autonomy of the state."

"Can corporate social responsibility (CSR) complement or even replace unalloyed market forces, or state regulation and intervention? This article examines the scope of CSR amongst a test case of transnational food manufacturing corporations. It focuses on the determinants of CSR that stem from the financialization of business strategies and how these define and prioritize social commitments and roles within such firms' internal organization. CSR policies, shareholder-value strategies and the rationalization of UK operations amongst four of the biggest global firms show a bias towards ‘external' and brand-related priorities rather than ‘internal' ones of job security and the social capital of workplace communities. The negotiated closure of two specific plants confirms an incompatibility between treating employees as stakeholders and, on the other hand, CSR as a business strategy. The ‘financialized' approach to shareholder value shapes business strategy to prioritize corporate brand image and reputation rather than attempting sustainable operations and stakeholder partnerships. "

"The discussion on ‘New Approaches to Political Economy (PE)' gives us a state-of-the-art overview of the main theoretical and conceptual developments within the concept of political economy. Thereby, it invites us to broaden our knowledge regarding manifold novel approaches, which make use of more complex methods to study the less stable, less predictable, but faster changing realities of smaller or bigger geographical regions. In this discussion forum, Amable takes a closer look on the nature of ‘conflict' as well as the relationship between conflict and institutional change or stability. After stressing the relevance of comparative capitalism in general, Regan also zooms in on the political conflicts in comparative political economy from three different perspectives (electoral politics, organized interest groups and business-state elites), where he finds new avenues, tensions and research agendas are opening up. From a different perspective, Avdagic reviews the broad developments in the field of political economy with respect to the supply and demand side of redistributive policy. Thereafter, Baccaro and Pontusson sketch an alternative ‘growth model perspective', which puts demand and distribution at the center of the analysis. Finally, Van der Zwan analyses the usefulness of financialization studies for the study of (comparative) political economy."

"Political economists have often drawn a hard line between the interests of owners of capital and the interests of labor. Yet over the past 30 years in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular, workers have become increasingly invested in capital markets activity through the privatization of pension systems and other incentives for market-based savings. In this article, we investigate whether this ‘financialization of everyday life' has generated a convergence of policy preferences whereby individuals support policies traditionally associated with the financial sector. Using three separate datasets on the US population, we find evidence that financial asset ownership is associated with lower support for more stringent financial regulatory policy, and higher support for financial sector bailouts. Such effects on individual preferences are modest on average, but persist even when controlling for indicators of social class and a range of other conditions, circumstances and time periods."

"This article provides estimations of the effects of different financial channels on physical investment in Europe using the balance sheets of publicly listed non-financial corporations (NFCs) for the period 1995–2015. The evidence suggests that both financial payments and financial income have an adverse effect on investment in fixed assets. The negative impacts of increasing financial income are non-linear with respect to company size: they crowd out investment in large companies, and have a positive effect on the investment of relatively smaller companies. Similar to the recent literature on finance-growth nexus, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial development and companies' investment. However, in contrast to the existing literature, we also find that a higher degree of financial development in the country is associated with a stronger negative effect of financial income on investment."

"We explore the consequences of increased financial investment by non-financial firms, finding consistent evidence that financialization in the non-finance sector reduced economic growth in that sector. Employing an expanded conceptualization of value added which identifies internal (capital, labour) and external (creditors, government, charities) stakeholders with claims on the value generated in production and exchange, we find that the declining value added produced by financialization was born most strikingly by labour and the state, while increasing value was channelled to corporate debt and equity holders. Corporate charities also had a net gain associated with increased financial investments by the non-financial firms."