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Abstract: Although recent forms of neoliberalism have been associated with everyday forms of ‘investment’, this paper argues that the financial conduct of everyday populations has long been an intense site of intervention. Drawing on the history of nineteenth and twentieth‐century Canadian government savings, annuities and tax deferral programs, this paper argues that everyday financial conduct has long been a key site of experimentation and innovation in practices of the self. These programs experiment with a language and practice of investment which emphasizes everyday conduct as a space of individual responsibility attached to diverse political goals. This suggests that enterprise as a mode of self and citizenship has a diverse and longer trajectory that predates neoliberalism. By extension, this paper conclude with a case for more diversified, complicated and historically‐situated analyses of ‘neoliberalism’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We devise a neoclassical economic model that reveals the underlying motivations for mergers, without resorting to distorted firm decisions or stock market inefficiency. Using empirical analyses to verify the model's predictions, we discover that mergers are more likely in economic booms than in recessions. Furthermore, we assert that a firm with insufficient physical capital is likely a bidder in a merger, whereas a firm with large physical capital is likely a target. Our findings are largely consistent with the waves of mergers during economic booms and the theory on operational synergies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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ABSTRACT: The economic theory of the labor‐managed firm dates back 60 years. Here I review the intellectual history of this field, with critical remarks and proposals for future development. The decades of the 1960s–1980s saw a burst of theoretical speculation that generally did not hold up well under empirical scrutiny. By the 1990s, progress on the mainstream theory of the firm was overtaking some of this early research. At the same time, a growing body of econometric work on labor‐managed firms was providing new stylized facts for theorists to explain. While the earlier period was characterized by an excess supply of theories relative to facts, more recently the balance has begun to tip in the opposite direction. I close by suggesting new theoretical directions that might shed light on the empirical asymmetries between capital‐managed and labor‐managed firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a new European Commission-sponsored longitudinal dataset-the VICO dataset-we assess the impact of independent (IVC) and corporate venture capital (CVC) investments on the economic performance of European high-tech entrepreneurial firms during the period 1992-2010. After controlling for potential sources of endogeneity and selection bias, our results indicate that both IVC and CVC investments boost portfolio firms' economic performance. These effects are mostly due to an increase in real sales value. Moreover, the dynamics of the impact of VC investments on firms' overall economic performance and its components-real sales value, real fixed assets, and real labor costs-differs depending on the type of investor. Finally, we do not detect any impact related to the syndication of investments by both IVC and CVC investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the aim of helping to revivify a stalled geographical literature on the place of land in capitalist political economies, this article presents a critique of the popular idea that land can be usefully conceptualised as a 'fictitious' form of capital or commodity. The critique is based primarily on a close and critical consideration of the grounds on which the identifiers and theorists of such fictitiousness - Marx/Harvey in the case of capital, Polanyi in the case of the commodity - distinguished it from 'real' variants. Those grounds, the article argues, are tenuous. And, far from disabling us, treating land as no more or less real than other forms of capital and commodity can empower us in productively revisiting and centring the question of land's political economy - a crucial undertaking in a world where the materiality of land to social relations is writ increasingly large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using ownership and control data for 890 firm-years, this article examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern-day standards. However, this does not necessarily mean that there was a modern-style separation of ownership from control in Victorian Britain. One major implication of our findings is that diffuse ownership was present in the UK much earlier than previously thought, and given that it occurred in an era with weak shareholder protection law, it somewhat undermines the influential law and finance hypothesis. We also find that diffuse ownership is correlated with large boards, a London head office, non-linear voting rights, and shares traded on multiple markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce costly internal capital into a standard insurance model, in which a risk-averse policyholder buys insurance from a risk-neutral insurer with limited liability. The unique optimal contract and internal capital lead to a strictly positive probability for insurer default. Some risks are uninsurable in that the insurer chooses not to provide insurance against such risks. An increase in the cost of capital may lead to a higher optimal amount of internal capital. The results extend to multiple policyholders in a symmetric setting. Our extension of the classical model to include costly internal capital provides a fruitful approach to many real world insurance markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]