The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization

Financialization has become the go-to term for scholars grappling with the growth of finance. This Handbook offers the first comprehensive survey of the scholarship on financialization, connecting finance with changes in politics, technology, culture, society and the economy.

It takes stock of the diverse avenues of research that comprise financialization studies and the contributions they have made to understanding the changes in contemporary societies driven by the rise of finance. The chapters chart the field’s evolution from research describing and critiquing the manifestations of financialization towards scholarship that pinpoints the driving forces, mechanisms and boundaries of financialization.

Written for researchers and students not only in economics but from across the social sciences and the humanities, this book offers a decidedly global and pluri-disciplinary view on financialization for those who are looking to understand the changing face of finance and its consequences.

Philip Mader is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (Brighton, UK) and program convenor of the MA in Globalisation, Business and Development. His research focuses on development and the politics of markets. His PhD from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the University of Cologne was published as The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financializing Poverty (Palgrave, 2015) and was recognized with the Otto Hahn Medal and the German Thesis Award.

Daniel Mertens is Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Osnabrück. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University. He received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and the University of Cologne. His work ranges from the politics of credit markets and banking to analyses of the modern tax state and has been published in outlets such as the Journal of European Public Policy, New Political Economy and Competition & Change.

Natascha van der Zwan is Assistant Professor in Public Administration at Leiden University. She does comparative and historical research on financialization and pension systems, investment rules and regulations, and pension fund capitalism. Her article ``Making Sense of Financialization'' (Socio-Economic Review, 2014) has become a key article in scholarship on financialization and is widely used in university courses. Dr Van der Zwan holds a PhD in Political Science from the New School for Social Research.