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

Joseph Baines and Sandy Brian Hager

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Abstract: 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.

Keywords: capital accumulation; competition; degree of monopoly; financialization; intangibles; intellectual property; productivity; profit; United States; rent; scarcity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D4 D42 D72 L12 O34 P1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-his and nep-hme
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:270981

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