Shareholder payouts across time and space: an internationally comparative and cross-sectoral analysis of corporate financialisation

Diliara Valeeva, Tobias J. Klinge and Manuel B. Aalbers

New Political Economy, 2023, vol. 28, issue 2, 173-189

Abstract: Shareholder value orientation has commonly been considered a hallmark of corporate financialisation. Today, firms increasingly share their profits with shareholders in the form of cash dividends and share buybacks. Yet how the shareholder payouts are distributed by firms from various sectors, sizes and countries remain unexplored. To complement existing accumulation- and asset-centred approaches that focus, respectively, on how resources enter the firm and change its structure, we present a payouts-centred approach to corporate financialisation that focuses on how resources leave the firm. This paper analyses firm-level trends in shareholder payouts in OECD member countries for the period 2000–2019, differentiating between types of distributed payouts. We show that shareholder payouts are high across various sectors and geographical locations, and not limited to a small subset of large, US-American financial corporations, but include ‘big pharma’ and ‘big tech’ as well as Latin American and Israeli firms. The paper sheds light on the nature of the contemporary corporations and contributes to discussions on the increasing financialisation of non-financial firms and their rising shareholder value orientation.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2022.2084522 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:28:y:2023:i:2:p:173-189

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cnpe20

DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2022.2084522

Access Statistics for this article

New Political Economy is currently edited by Professor Colin Hay

More articles in New Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().