Speculating on convergence: the Western European finance‐led growth regime and the new European periphery

Operating at the theoretical boundary between Political Economy, International Relations and Regional European Integration Studies, this Doctoral thesis explores how the ‘top‐down’ institutional redesign of the expanding European polity has worked to produce the necessary extra‐market (social and political) support structures for the rise of European financial capital, while profoundly reshaping the dynamics of accumulation and social reproduction on the European continent. As such, this work links the processes of deepening and widening European integration to the wider sphere of global financial integration and finance‐led restructuring, a lacuna in the existing literature. Concretely, I argued that finance, the preeminent globalising force rather than a tertiary activity, has been at the centre of European integration project. Over the past decade in particular, the transformations in the European financial sector, the so‐called financialisation of Europe, while seemingly driven by imperatives arising from the exigencies of economic competition, should be understood primarily as a political‐economic process deeply embedded in a geopolitical rivalry. Crucially, Europe’s engagement, while embedded in a global financial system, is distinct. European finance proceeds on the basis of its institutional specificity. Here history, tradition, culture, and geopolitical context, and therefore in turn, specifically European institutions, define the mechanisms through which the financialisation of the European space has unfolded. From this standpoint, the thesis also explores the constitutive role played by Western European financial institutions in the financial integration of the Central European new member states and the consequent ideological and institutional reconfiguration of Europe’s Eastern post‐communist periphery in line with the demands of a liberal (financialised) market democracy. In doing so, the thesis also poses a challenge to the dominancy of a‐historic and depoliticized (indeed teleological) narratives of capitalist state formation in post‐communist Central Europe, which ultimately reduces post‐communist transformations to a straightforward and technical transition towards a predefined capitalist future

Discriminatory Residential Preferences in Germany - A Vignette Study

The article focusses on the generating mechanisms of residential segregation for the demand side of housing markets, i.e., discriminatory residential preferences of inhabitants regarding the composition of their neighborhood. The data stem from an online survey among a random sample of the population of a mid-sized German city. In a vignette experiment, respondents were asked to rate example residential settings with respect to their attractiveness. The settings varied regarding the ethnic and religious composition of the neighborhood and other neighborhood characteristics that are positively or negatively related to residential attractiveness.We find that respondents have discriminatory residential preferences toward migrants and the presence of a Muslim community in the neighborhood. One-half of the migrant effect is mitigated if other positively connoted residential characteristics exist. We take this as an indication for statistical discrimination. This does not hold for the “Muslim community” effect. Discrimination gets stronger with higher levels of perceived economic group-threat from migrants. We further find evidence for a cultural group-threat and for the contact hypothesis: religious people are more discriminatory than nonreligious people, and real-life contact with migrants entails less discrimination

Intergenerational wealth transmission and homeownership in Europe : a comparative perspective

The literature on social and wealth inequality has long acknowledged the importance of intergenerational wealth transmission (IWT) to inequality in homeownership tenure. However, it has paid insufficient attention to the institutional structures that moderate these inequalities. Therefore, in this study, we ask how institutional factors via differential housing finance systems and governmental housing policies, moderate the association between IWT and homeownership tenure. This is done by using the framework of housing regime configurations and mortgage market financialization. To do so, we pooled data for 20 European countries from the European Central Bank’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for 2010–2017, for household heads aged 25–40. Our main findings show consistent contradiction to the welfare state–homeownership “trade-off” hypothesis: that is, when the rental market is more heavily regulated, it is actually young adults who benefited from IWT or who received higher value of IWT have a higher probability of mortgaged homeownership. Paradoxically, when housing finance institutions are more active and generous, the wealthiest young adults hold an advantage in mortgaged homeownership. Therefore, liberal mortgage markets actually serve to enable wealthier young adults to reproduce and preserve their parental wealth status. Further, when housing prices are less affordable (median mortgage-to-income ratio), those who have received a higher amount of IWT hold an advantage in mortgaged homeownership. We discuss the implications of our findings, which cut across the socioeconomic, spatial, and demographical arenas.publishe

Homeownership regimes and class inequality among young adults

In this study, we merge the literature on homeownership regimes, which focuses to a lesser extent on the consequences of wealth and social inequality, with the literature on wealth and social stratification, which overlooks the importance of homeownership regimes in contributing to those inequalities. Within this framework, we examine to what extent homeownership regimes shape class inequality in homeownership among young adults and the mortgage debt burden that usually accompanies it. We first develop an updated typology of homeownership regimes that incorporates the role of the family via intergenerational wealth transfers (IWT) such as gifts and housing assets. This dimension was theoretically underdeveloped and empirically absent from previous homeownership typologies. Second, we employ this typology to investigate class-based gaps in homeownership and mortgage debt burden within and between homeownership regimes. This is done by pooling data for a total of 20 countries from two sources: the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2013–2014 (EuroStat) for EU countries, and the Household Expenditure Survey 2012–2013 (CBS) for Israel. Using multivariate modeling, we find that homeownership regimes in which IWT in the form of financial support is common practice increase class inequality in homeownership compared to regimes in which IWT of assets is common practice. Contrary to the literature suggesting that liberal mortgage markets advance inclusion, it appears that in the homeownership regime characterized by the most liberal housing finance system (which includes Northern European countries and the Netherlands), class inequality in mortgaged homeownership is the widest but class inequality in mortgage debt burden is the narrowest. Homeownership regimes characterized by IWT of assets (which include Southern and Central Eastern European countries) reveal the opposite patterns. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on homeownership regimes and wealth inequality, with a specific focus on young adults.publishe

Descriptive statistics of macro-level indicators, by country.

Descriptive statistics of macro-level indicators, by country.</p

AME for pooled multinomial logistic regression predicting the difference in probability of housing tenure, by IWT and control variables.

AME for pooled multinomial logistic regression predicting the difference in probability of housing tenure, by IWT and control variables.</p

Fig 5 -

a-e. Predictive margins of pooled multinomial logistic regression predicting the difference in probability of housing tenure by IWT and macro variables (reference group: Non-homeownership). Note: Macro variables are centered around the mean.</p

Housing tenure categories by quintiles of the amount of IWT and country.

Housing tenure categories by quintiles of the amount of IWT and country.</p

S3 Table -

(DOCX)</p