From Passive Owners to Planet Savers? Asset Managers, Carbon Majors and the Limits of Sustainable Finance

climate finance oil ownership and controlThis article examines the role of the Big Three asset management firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – in corporate environmental governance. Specifically, it charts the Big Three’s relationships with the publicly-owned Carbon Majors: a small group of fossil fuels, cement and mining companies responsible for the bulk of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. It finds that the Big Three much more often than not oppose rather than support shareholder resolutions aimed at improving environmental governance. Notably, this is even the case with the Big Three’s environmental, social and governance funds. A more fine-gained analysis shows that the combined voting decisions of the Big Three are more likely to lead to the failure than to the success of environmental resolutions and that, whether they succeed or fail, these resolutions tend to be narrow in scope and piecemeal in nature. Based on these findings, the article raises serious doubts about the Big Three’s credentials as environmental stewards

Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis

commodities corporation crisis ecology finance power valuationCommodity trading firms occupy a central position in global supply chains and their activities have been associated with financial instability, social upheaval and manifold forms of ecological devastation. This paper examines these companies in the context of debates regarding corporate financialization. We find that since the 2003–2011 commodity boom, trading firms have become less financialized in terms of the source of their profits as they have shifted away from financial activities. However, they have become more financialized in terms of the destination of profits, with dividend and share repurchase commitments reaching new heights after 2015. In view of this finding, we inquire into whether trading firms’ growing commitment to shareholder payouts will encourage them to continue to prioritize short-term returns, or whether instead these firms’ linkages to financial markets will lend clout to financial activists concerned by the long-term environmental and social consequences of their operations. Ultimately, we find several sources of commodity trader resilience which insulate them from shareholder resolutions and divestment campaigns aimed at curbing ecological destruction and human rights abuses in their supply chains. We accordingly suggest that pressures from activist investors must be complemented with more wide-ranging efforts to defend living systems across the planet

Jurisdictional Tax Rates. How the Corporate Tax System Fuels Concentration and Inequality

corporate taxation differential accumulation dominant capital inequalityCorporate concentration in the United States has been on the rise in recent years, sparking a heated debate about its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. In this study, we examine a facet of public policy that has been largely neglected in current debates about concentration: corporate tax policy. As part of our analysis we develop the first empirical mapping of the effective tax rates (ETRs) of nonfinancial corporations disaggregated by size and broken down by jurisdiction. Our findings reveal a striking and persistent tax advantage for big business in recent decades. Since the mid-1980s, large corporations have faced lower worldwide ETRs relative to their smaller counterparts. The regressive worldwide ETR is driven by persistent regressivity in the domestic ETR and a marked drop in the progressivity of the foreign ETR over the past decade. We go on to show how persistent regressivity in the worldwide tax structure is bound up with the increasing relative power of large corporations within the corporate universe, as well as a shift in firm-level power relations. As large corporations become less disposed to investments that may indirectly benefit ordinary workers, they become more disposed to shareholder value enhancement that directly benefits the asset-rich. What this means is that the corporate tax structure is connected not only to rising corporate concentration, but also to widening household inequality

The Great Debt Divergence and its Implications for the Covid-19 Crisis: Mapping Corporate Leverage as Power

capital as power corporate concentration Covid-19 crisis debt leverageThe COVID-19 pandemic has amplified longstanding concerns about mounting levels of corporate debt in the United States. This article places the current conjuncture in its historical context, analysing corporate indebtedness against the backdrop of increasing corporate concentration. Theorising leverage as a form of power, we find that the leverage of large non-financial firms increased in recent decades, while their debt servicing burdens decreased. At the same time, smaller firms experienced sharp deleveraging alongside increasing debt servicing costs. Crucially, smaller corporations also registered severe losses over this period, while large corporations remained profitable, and in fact doubled their net profit margins from the early-1990s to the present. Taken together, the results from our mapping exercise uncover a series of dramatic changes in the financial fortunes of large versus smaller firms in recent decades, a phenomenon we refer to as the great debt divergence. We explain this divergence with reference to the dynamics of power in the era of ‘shareholder capitalism’, and we argue that the US political economy in the post-COVID 19 world is likely to resemble the pre-COVID 19 one, only with more market turmoil, more concentration, more inequality, and even less investment

The Tax Advantage of Big Business: How the Structure of Corporate Taxation Fuels Concentration and Inequality

corporate taxation concentration inequality capital as power financializationCorporate concentration in the United States has been on the rise in recent years, sparking a heated debate about its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. This article examines a facet of public policy that has been neglected in the debate: corporate taxation. Developing the first empirical mapping of the effective tax rates of nonfinancial corporations disaggregated by size and broken down by jurisdiction, the article reveals a striking tax advantage for big business at home and abroad. The analysis goes on to show how persistent regressivity in the tax structure is bound up with the increasing relative power of large corporations within the corporate universe, as well as a shift in firm-level power relations. As large corporations become less disposed to investments that may indirectly benefit ordinary workers, they become more disposed to shareholder value enhancement that directly benefits the asset-rich. What this means is that the corporate tax structure is connected not only to rising corporate concentration but also to widening household inequality

Secondary ion emission from single massive gold cluster impacts

Secondary ion mass spectrometry, SIMS, is one of the most versatile surface analytical techniques. The significant parameter determining the performance of SIMS is the secondary ion yield. Atomic projectiles, traditionally used in SIMS, are an inefficient method to desorb and generate secondary ions. The use of poly-atomic projectiles, such as (CsI)nCs, Au3, SF5 and C60, has been demonstrated to be an effective means to enhance secondary ion yields. Still larger secondary ion yields can be obtained with massive gold clusters, specifically Au4004+. Secondary ion yields from organic targets approach unity and are in excess of unity for selected inorganic targets. This dissertation is a first study of the secondary ion emission characteristics resulting from surface bombardment of keV Au400. The enhanced secondary ion yields from these massive clusters resulted in a need to detect isobaric secondary ions. An eight-anode detector was designed, built and implemented to study secondary ion emission resulting from massive projectile impacts. Secondary ion yield enhancements, resulting from use of the multi-anode detector, are reported along with secondary ion distributions for organic and inorganic targets. Au-adduct ions have been observed in mass spectra resulting form organic and inorganic targets bombarded by Au400. Data indicate that these adducts are a result of projectile/surface molecule interactions and not a product of Au implantation. Secondary ion yields of these adducts are reported. Although these adduct ion yields are an order of magnitude lower than the non-adduct ions, we have demonstrated their potential usefulness in analytical applications, such as examining surface homogeneity. Finally, these novel projectiles have been used to examine secondary ion emission from targets with different structural properties which have the same stoichiometry. In a comparative study, we have measured a significant difference in secondary ion emission and yields from the two systems, graphite and ñ-ZrP. Au400, at 136 keV, is effective in terms of secondary ion yield and secondary ion multiplicity enhancement. When used in the event-by-event bombardment/detection mode, the desorption volume has a diameter between 10-20 nm with and emission depth of approximately 5 nm, perturbing less than an attomole of analyte

Rentiership and Intellectual Monopoly in Contemporary Capitalism: Conceptual Challenges and Empirical Possibilities

The concepts of rentiership and intellectual monopoly have gained increased prominence in discussions about the transformation of global capitalism in recent years. However, there have been few if any attempts to construct measures for rentiership and intellectual monopoly using firm-level financial data. The absence of such work, we argue, is symptomatic of conceptual challenges in delineating what precisely qualifies as rent, intellectual or otherwise. In place of static conceptions of rent and intellectual monopoly, we develop a dynamic framework for analyzing the processes of rentierization and intellectual monopolization and apply this framework to the analysis of the transformation of non-financial firms in the United States since the 1950s. We find that the timing and intensity of rentierization and intellectual monopolization differs significantly across sector and firm size and is heavily mediated by the uneven ramifications of government policy across companies and industries. Overall, our framework illuminates the variegated landscape of corporate power in the US, and offers a useful guide for critically interrogating rentierization and intellectual monopolization in other contexts

From Passive Owners to Planet Savers? Asset Managers, Carbon Majors and the Limits of Sustainable Finance

This article examines the role of the Big Three asset management firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – in corporate environmental governance. Specifically, it charts the Big Three’s relationships with the publicly-owned Carbon Majors: a small group of fossil fuels, cement and mining companies responsible for the bulk of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. It finds that the Big Three much more often than not oppose rather than support shareholder resolutions aimed at improving environmental governance. Notably, this is even the case with the Big Three’s environmental, social and governance funds. A more fine-gained analysis shows that the combined voting decisions of the Big Three are more likely to lead to the failure than to the success of environmental resolutions and that, whether they succeed or fail, these resolutions tend to be narrow in scope and piecemeal in nature. Based on these findings, the article raises serious doubts about the Big Three’s credentials as environmental stewards