F.CochoyDu lien marchand. Comment le marché fait société2012Presses Universitaires du MirailToulouse402 pp.

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"Great De-Mortgaging": der Rückzug der Lebensversicherer aus der Wohnungsfinanzierung im deutsch-amerikanischen Vergleich

Recent research in economic history has found that mortgage debt in relation to GDP has taken off in the historical long run (“great mortgaging”), as growing banking assets have been redirected into mortgage credit. This paper maps the parallel long-run investment history of private (life) insurance as the much overlooked second pillar of the financial system. Drawing on in-depth studies of the US and Germany, it finds that a “great de-mortgaging” took place in insurers’ portfolios, with mortgages falling from up to 90 percent in the 19th century to below 5 percent today in favor of fixed-income securities. A parallel shift to secondary mortgage bonds has hardly offset this decline, while direct real estate remained largely a residual investment class. Banks’ great mortgaging is thus partly an institutional substitution effect. The paper sees insurers’ asset shift itself as mainly driven by long-run changes in capital demand and competition with banks and pension funds. It extends these findings to other long-term institutional investors and other OECD countries in the historical long run

The origins of national housing finance systems: a comparative investigation into historical variations in mortgage finance regimes

This paper advances the first historically informed typology of housing finance systems. Using a novel collection of historical mortgage-market data, we identify four different ‘ideal type’ systems, which developed in mature economies when organised housing finance institutions began to emerge with the advance of industrialism and urbanism throughout the long nineteenth century: informal person-to-person lending, and state lending as solutions outside specialised banking circuits; and deposit-based and bond-based institutions as banking solutions. We adapt Alexander Gerschenkron's economic backwardness thesis in order to explain the temporal and spatial emergence of these distinct types, arguing that these systems created path-dependent logics, which made their influence felt over a century later

Private spanner in public works? The corrosive effects of private insurance on public life

Contemporary societies are not only “risk societies”, but also insurance societies. While the shift of systemic risks from the community to the individual is a distinctive trait of modernity, research on the consequences of this process has focused almost exclusively on welfare state responses aimed at re-collectivizing societal risks. Individual-level reactions associated with the need for a private safety net against the uncertainty brought by risk societies have been largely overlooked. What happens to a society and its individuals when private insurance becomes commonplace? Focusing on Germany, we use the data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2018) to investigate the attitudinal antecedents and consequences of contracting private insurance. As one of the most important sources of private welfare, life insurance attracts risk-averse individuals who are highly concerned with public economic affairs and see the market-based solutions of conservative parties as the best way to safeguard their economic security. While short-term attitudinal effects are absent, a longitudinal approach reveals that becoming insured gradually increases economic security but also entails withdrawal from public life and aversion to parties that support social redistribution. The loss of dynamism of a society may thus be related not only to public welfare but also to a private institution at the heart of the financial markets, which moreover has privatizing, welfare-eroding effects. The paper argues for a more general sociology of insurance

Do rent controls and other tenancy regulations affect new construction? Some answers from long-run historical evidence

The (re-)introduction of tenancy regulation in the form of rent controls, tenant protection or supply rationing is back on the agenda of policymakers in light of rent inflation in many global cities. While rent controls promise short-term relief, economists point to their negative long-run effects on new construction. This study presents new long-run data on both rent regulation and housing construction for 16 developed countries (1910–2016) and finds that more restrictive rental market legislation generally has a negative impact on both new housing construction and residential investment. This is especially true for strict rent controls and housing rationing measures in the post-1960 period. Tenancy security can on average also dampen construction activity. The negative effect is overall less significant and strong in magnitude than expected and may have been offset by exemptions for new construction, by compensating social housing construction and by a flight of new construction into the owner-occupied sector. Still, on average, rent controls came at the cost of less construction activity

Rent price control – yet another great equalizer of economic inequalities? Evidence from a century of historical data

The long-run U-shaped patterns of economic inequality are standardly explained by basic economic trends (Piketty’s r > g), taxation policies or ‘great levellers’ such as catastrophes. This article argues that housing policy, and particularly rent control, is a neglected explanatory factor in understanding macro inequality. We hypothesize that rent control could decrease overall housing wealth, lower incomes of generally richer landlords and increase disposable incomes of generally poorer tenants. Using original long-run data for up to 16 countries (1900–2016), we show that rent controls lowered wealth-to-income ratios, top income shares, Gini coefficients, rents and rental expenditure. Overall, rent controls need to be strict in order to have tangible effects, and only the stricter historical rent controls did significantly reduce inequalities. The study argues that housing policies should generally receive more attention in understanding economic inequalities

Firm foundations: The statistical footprint of multinational corporations as a problem for political economy

The discipline of comparative political economy (CPE) relies heavily on aggregate, country-level economic indicators. However, the practices of multinational corporations have increasingly undermined this approach to measurement. The problem of indicator drift is well documented by a growing critical literature and calls for systematic methodological attention in CPE. We present the case for a rocky but ultimately rewarding middle road between indicator fatalism and indicator faith. We illustrate our argument by examining two important cases—Sweden’s recent export success and the financialization of non-financial corporations in France. A careful parsing of the data suggests corrections to common characterizations of the two cases. Swedish exports have been reshaped by intragroup trade among foreign subsidiaries of domestic corporations. The growth of financial assets held by French firms is attributable to the growth of foreign direct investment and to cumulative revaluation effects, while what remains of financialization is concentrated among the very largest firms. Based on these findings, we propose a methodological routine that parses data by zooming in on the qualitative specifics of countries, sectors, and firms, while using all available options for disaggregation

Übelkeit und Erbrechen als evolutionäre Mechanismen der vielschichtigen Anpassung an die Schwangerschaft

Einleitung: Übelkeit und Erbrechen während der Schwangerschaft (nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, NVP) ist ein häufiges und bisher uneinheitlich interpretiertes Phänomen mit hohem Leidensdruck für die Betroffenen. Bemerkenswert sind eine Korrelation mit einem erfolgreicheren Schwangerschaftsausgang und ein enger zeitlicher Zusammenhang mit der Embryogenese. Unser funktionelles Konzept, NVP in einem evolutionsbiologischen Kontext als vielschichtige Anpassungsreaktion an die Schwangerschaft zu deuten, soll neue Denkansätze liefern. Methodik: Wir führten eine kulturenvergleichende Untersuchung an 565 Müttern in Südafrika, Guatemala und Deutschland in Form eines standardisierten retrospektiven Interviews während des Wochenbetts durch. Ergebnisse: Es zeigte sich kulturübergreifend eine ähnliche Prävalenz und Klinik mit ausgeprägtem subjektiven Leidensdruck bei geringer objektiv erfassbarer Symptomatik. Es fanden sich Hinweise für eine multifaktorielle Ätiologie mit biologischen, psychologischen und soziologischen Einflussfaktoren. Ebenfalls vielschichtig schienen die Auswirkungen von NVP zu sein, die Ernährung, Verhalten, Wahrnehmung, Psyche und Sozialstatus betrafen. Diskussion und Schlussfolgerung: Unsere und bestehende Forschungsergebnisse stützen die Vorstellung, dass NVP durch die Evolution selektiert wurde, weil es als funktionelle Anpassungsreaktion während der vulnerablen frühen Schwangerschaft mehr Nutzen als Schaden bringt. Dafür sprechen die Korrelation mit einer besseren fetalen Prognose, die kulturübergreifend hohe Prävalenz und die eher geringen biologischen Kosten bei relativ hohem subjektiven Leidensdruck. Der adaptative Wert des Syndroms könnte sich ergeben durch Nahrungsumstellung, Zunahme der sozialen Unterstützung, Verhaltensanpassung, früheres Erkennen der Schwangerschaft sowie durch positive Beeinflussung der embryonalen Entwicklung. Um die Funktionalität von NVP zu verstehen, bedarf es der Betrachtung des gesamten Symptomenkomplexes mit seinen psychisch-emotionalen Auswirkungen sowie der Einordnung in den Kontext eines “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness“ (EEA)

Homeowner nations or nations of tenants : how historical institutions in urban politics, housing finance and construction set Germany, France and the US on different housing paths

The thesis gives an answer to the question of why different countries ended up with different rates of homeowners and tenants in the 20th-century. The literature identifies Germanspeaking countries of low homeownership rates around 40% and English-speaking countries of high homeownership rates of more than 60%, with France falling in between the two groups. Moreover, most of these differences have persisted through the second half of the 20th-century and can be shown to reach back to different urban homeownership rates around 1900. The homeownership-question is of importance beyond the mere question of tenure as studies have associated homeownership questions with stability in financial crises, with embourgeoisement of the working-class in life-style, attitudes and voting behavior or with different unemployment rates. Existing explanations have used post-1980 international, regional or individual data to explain homeownership differences through socio-demographic, economic or urbanization differences, through a public-welfare/homeownership trade-off or else through cultural preferences. These explanations fail to account, however, for the persistent country differences that existed already prior to the 1980s and prior to government intervention in housing. The thesis, by contrast, goes back to 19th-century differences of urban organization, housing finance and the construction sector to claim that countries were historically set on different housing trajectories establishing differences hard to reverse in later periods. The US and Germany are chosen for historic case studies of the often opposed country groups. France is included to use the variables found for explaining why a country of similar welfare type as Germany kept a persistently higher urban homeownership rate. The thesis claims that different complementary institutions in city organization, the housing finance and construction industry locked countries into inert physical and institutional structures of either the compact tenement city-form in Germany or the suburbanized form of a city of homes like in the United States. More concretely, functional complementarities of public welfare cities, housing cooperatives, mortgage banks and a raftsmanship production of solid single-unit homes led to the German tenant-dominance, whereas private cities, savings and loans (SLAs) and a Fordist mass production of single-family homes created the American production regime in favor of more accessible homeownership. Though the thesis establishes the argument for Germany and the US in historic case studies, it tries to make plausible that it can be extended to other German- and English-speaking countries. The innovation of the thesis concerning the particular explanatory puzzle lies in its reference to relevant historical prior causes, its inclusion of the urban level of analysis and the combination of three institutional factors – urban organization, housing finance, construction – that even singly have not been put forward yet in comparative explanations. The thesis contributes to the literature on path dependencies that identifies distant occurrences as longterm causes for hard-to-reverse historical trajectories. On a theoretical level, the study contributes to research in a yet little noticed type of market, i.e. markets for durable goods whose use stretches over time, and which therefore requires history-directed explanations

Herrschaftslehren des Kapitals: Rezension zu "Capital et Idéologie" von Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty: Capital et Idéologie. Les livres du nouveau monde. Paris: Édition du Seuil 2019. 978-2-02-133804-