The rise of finance: causes and consequences of financialization

Abstract

As we wrote in the call for articles to this special issue of the Socio-Economic Review on ‘The Rise of Finance: Causes and Consequences of Financialization’, the ‘financialization of the economy … stands out as one of the largest changes in the structure of the economy over the last half of the twentieth century’. We characterized financialization following van der Zwan's (2014, p. 99) stress on ‘the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, the ascendency of the shareholder value orientation and the financialization of everyday life’. We hoped this would extend existing research on the causes and consequences of financialization and particularly help extend the focus of financialization research beyond a frequent focus on the USA and into a broader frame of comparative political economy. The articles in this special issue add to existing knowledge in three main ways. First, they add to existing research on the consequences of financialization on inequality and the mechanisms through which finance operates. In ‘Top Incomes Under Finance-driven Capitalism, 1990–2007’, Eoin Flaherty investigates financialization-centred sources of income concentration among the most affluent 1% of households in 14 rich democracies. In his ‘Financialization, Non-financialization and Income Inequality: the Case of France’, Ignacio Alvarez Peralta analyses financialization as a cause of the wage share in non-financial firms for France, 2004–2013, and finds that not only does increased dependence on financial profits decrease wage share, but that this variable is more important than traditional determinants of the income distribution. Second, these articles show that financialization has negative consequences that extend beyond increasing inequality in the distribution of goods, as financialization appears to act as a drag on the economy and direct government policy away from workers. In his ‘How does Finance Affect Labor Market Institutions’, Thibault Darcillon has examined the impacts of financialization on underlying determinants of wages share like workers' bargaining power and employment protection legislation. In his ‘Corporate Ownership of the Public Debt: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance’, Sandy Hager explores the concentration of the public debt in financial firms and argues that this concentration proceeds in tandem with shifts in government policy that benefits these government bondholders. In their ‘Did Financialization Reduce Economic Growth’, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Ken-Hou Lin show that, beyond greater inequality, financialization had negative effects on economic growth in the USA.