Values in Exchange: Ambiguous Ownership, Collective Action, and Changing Notions of Worth in Romanian Mutual Fund Industry

This paper analyzes the political disputes and legal contentions occasioned by the process of regulatory reform undergone by Romanian mutual fund industry. Stirred by Romania’s accession into the European Union in 2007 and prompted by the numerous financial scandals affecting the market right from its creation in 1994, the reform is meant as a reconfiguration of the investment philosophy characterizing the capital market. My claim is that the uneasy reception of the new institutional arrangement is related to the shifting premises for the formation of value and the deeper changes in the prevalent conceptions of worth associated with Romania’s economic transition

Values in Exchange: Ambiguous Ownership, Collective Action, and Changing Notions of Worth in Romanian Mutual Fund Industry

This paper analyzes the political disputes and legal contentions occasioned by the process of regulatory reform undergone by Romanian mutual fund industry. Stirred by Romania’s accession into the European Union in 2007 and prompted by the numerous financial scandals affecting the market right from its creation in 1994, the reform is meant as a reconfiguration of the investment philosophy characterizing the capital market. My claim is that the uneasy reception of the new institutional arrangement is related to the shifting premises for the formation of value and the deeper changes in the prevalent conceptions of worth associated with Romania’s economic transition.financial regulation, mutual funds, anthropology of finance

CHARY OPPORTUNISTS: MONEY, VALUES, AND CHANGE IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA

This dissertation examines the connections between shifting notions of money and values in contemporary Romania as a way to analyze the unfolding economic, political, and social changes during postsocialism. It is based on the ethnographic analysis of disputes following the collapse of several mutual funds during the late 1990s. Such ongoing disputes have taken the form of public protests, petitions to state authorities, media interventions, suggestions to improve regulations regarding the capital market, and, most conspicuously, legal actions against those responsible for the bankruptcies and for compensation to the investors whose money was lost. I situate such contentious interactions within histories of institutional importation after the end of socialism, such as the emerging capital market at the beginning of the 1990s, the electronic market created soon after that with support from USAID, the mutual fund sector growing at the end of the 1990s, and the regulatory reform of the capital market with Romania’s accession into the European Union in 2007. My informants were living not only a postsocialist transition to capitalism but also a neoliberal transformation in the global architecture of financial capitalism, and a reorganization of the state with its inclusion into the EU. I found that an ethos of chary opportunism was emerging both as a response to and as a catalyst of the economic transformations experienced by my interlocutors. I also argue that, as the financial instruments materializing indexical and performative forms of money engendered volatile registers of value common for the capital market, my informants faced growing economic uncertainties through a wary form of opportunistic conduct, the appeal to courts for solving key disputes about money and its value, and constant demands to the state to mitigate risks and the effects of the market. Their outlook makes it easier to understand that change is not determined by pre-existing configurations of values, but is often the result of attempts to apply previously tested routines to new situations. Change happens while many are still looking backwards, and the past enters the present not as continuity but as a template replicated instrumentally in situations of radical uncertainty

Values in Exchange: Ambiguous Ownership, Collective Action, and Changing Notions of Worth in Romanian Mutual Fund Industry

This paper analyzes the political disputes and legal contentions occasioned by the process of regulatory reform undergone by Romanian mutual fund industry. Stirred by Romania’s accession into the European Union in 2007 and prompted by the numerous financial scandals affecting the market right from its creation in 1994, the reform is meant as a reconfiguration of the investment philosophy characterizing the capital market. My claim is that the uneasy reception of the new institutional arrangement is related to the shifting premises for the formation of value and the deeper changes in the prevalent conceptions of worth associated with Romania’s economic transition

Institutional and Socio-Cultural Factors Explaining the Development of Mutual Funds. A Cross-Country Analysis

This paper explores the institutional and socio-cultural factors explaining the differential development and growth rates of the mutual fund industry in a sample of 41 countries. It draws on multivariate OLS regressions. It shows that the development of mutual funds is influenced positively by regulatory quality and economic and financial system development, but it is negatively related to the presence of a Lamfalussy type regulatory framework (as in all member states of the European Union). Also, widespread belief in work as the legitimate source of monetary gain seems to be negatively associated with mutual fund development. The growth rates of national mutual fund industries are negatively related to general economic development. The negative coefficient of the variable coding for regulatory quality indicates that a poorer regulation of the field (when compared to the developed countries) does not necessarily inhibit growth, especially in the case of young industries. Lamfalussy regulations do not have any significant effect on mutual fund growth. At the same time, mutual fund industries have grown most rapidly in countries with high percentages of Muslim and Christina Orthodox believers

CHOICE IN CONTEXT: RATIONALITY, CONTINGENCY AND RISK IN THE DIVIDEND POLICY

This paper is a critical review of the recent literature regarding the dividend policy with regards to the different conceptualizations of rationality demonstrated by managers of companies or individual investors. This approach gives us the opportunity to reassess the latest contributions to dividend policy analysis and to adopt an alternative perspective to those of authors that have split the literature on dividends in the normative vs. descriptive approaches, empirical vs. theoretical contributions, according to the distinct paradigms various approaches illustrate, or according to chronological criteria. We surmise that the issue of rationality / irrationality occasions a better understanding of the latest contributions to corporate finance from the subfields of behavioral finance and of cultural finance. Such contributions challenge the premises of rational choice, one that is foundational for the neoclassic paradigm. Behavioral corporate finance and cultural corporate finance underline the role of psychological and socio-cultural factors for the dividend policy. They facilitate the emergence of notions of situated / contingent rationality considered responsible for the diverse shapes taken by the financial policies of the corporation

Culture, Materiality, Memory: Collective Ownership and Action In Romanian Mutual Funds

The paper presents the tensions between collectivist and corporatist forms of ownership for Romanian mutual funds. Drawing on my research among retail investors of funds that ended up in bankruptcy throughout the postsocialist period, I document the material practices and graphic artefacts they deploy in litigation as ways to make claims and produce evidence regarding their ongoing financial involvement and the rights to compensations. I focus specifically on the files documenting their personal histories (providing moral reasons for pursuing “speculative” investments) as well as those materializing the memory of their involvement with the capital market. I conclude that material practices are constitutive of vernacular forms of financial and legal knowledge. Furthermore, they engender specific types of property that serve as premises for the defense of investor rights and as grounds for emerging forms of collective action. Methodologically, the conclusion of the paper is that qualitative methods constitute alternative approaches and a valuable complement of quantitate research methods for the behaviors of mutual fund investors illustrating some of the cultural components giving specific dynamics to the popular participation to the capital market that can be subsequently quantified

The planning game - for an archeology of cybernetics in economy

Taking as starting point ‘The Planning Game’ developed in the frame of ‘Utopian Cities, Programmed Societies’ project, the paper reunites viewpoints related to cybernetics, socialist industry, AI & cybernetics archaeology within the ex-socialist countries, and looks to offer a platform of reflection related to games as method and tool of analysis and critical intervention. Apart from the historical and theoretical aspects of the intervention, the panel discusses game as a form of reenactment, as performative intervention, as a method to unveil the multi-scalar technological condition of socialist industries and economies. It allows the audience to learn about the organization of socialist industry (and the institutional incentives for generating “precarious data”), but also about the way of functioning and the incidence of the individuals. Our aim is to address aspects related to the symbiosis and dynamics between data and users, between a centralized economy and the citizens of a socialist state, as well as the competitions between states. By doing so, the panel aims to bring into discussion concepts such as quality of data, human-data interaction, ideological, social and data control, and economic competition and shows how some of these concepts might help us to have a better understanding of the digital present.</p