Description
Join the Finance and Society cluster!
For better or worse, the financial sector plays a critical role in modern market economies: financial institutions and markets are a critical sector for supporting households, enterprises and governments with payment, saving, credit and risk management services; however, they have also been at the core of recent crises, such as the Global Financial and the Eurodebt crises. The financial sector is also at the centre of several societal challenges of the 21st century: first, digitalisation affects economies and societies, including with the emergence of new financial service providers (fintech) and platform firms, such as Facebook, Google, Paypal, Alibaba and Tencent expanding into financial service provision, creating new challenges for consumers, regulators and competition authorities.
At the same time, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence have an important impact on how financial services are being provided and important repercussions for financial stability and raises important questions on the ownership of personal data that are being provided on the Internet. Second, climate change is no doubt the most important challenge for humanity in the next decades. Financing the transition to a net-zero society will involve a mix of public and private resources, which points to the critical role of the financial sector. At the same time, financial institutions and markets face higher risk due to climate change (physical risk) and regulatory changes as its consequence (transition risk).
The evolution, role and risks of financial services are being researched by a number of academics across departments of the EUI, including economics, law, political science and history. Economists and political economists often focus on institutions and policies underpinning an effective and stable financial systems, while legal scholars focus on the development and enforcement of legal rules and norms. Political scientists disentangle the political and partisan interests underlying financial sector reforms and analyse conflicts around policy reforms and financial structure, while historians study past financial structures, flows and crises to inform the current debate.
Researchers from different disciplines use different methods and data; more importantly, they have very different approaches to financial service providers that are complementary to each other. Encouraging interaction between different disciplines on this critical topic will enrich the debate, provide everyone with new insights and ultimately sharpen the message that research in this area provides to policy makers and society. An interdisciplinary research cluster can help further improve the policy dialogue and sharpen the policy messages.
Finance and Society cluster library information specialist: Thomas Bourke
ACTIVITIES
We have two key activities planned for 2024: regular brown bag lunch seminars and a research workshop on Economies of scale, politics of localism? Financial integration and fragmentation in Europe and beyond, on 21-22 October.
The workshop will be the first external first external event organised by the Finance and Society Interdisciplinary Research Cluster, in collaboration with the Florence School of Banking and Finance of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. This will be a workshop on the Political Economy of Banking and Finance, with a topical focus on the politics of financial integration and fragmentation in Europe and beyond.
We welcome contributions from scholars across disciplines, including economics, finance, history, law, political science, regulatory theory, and sociology; as well as scholars who work at the intersection between disciplines. The workshop will be held in person in Florence on 21-22 October 2024. It is expected that all participants prepare an original research paper to be presented and discussed among peers. It is also expected that revised versions of these papers will subsequently form the backbone of a special issue of a premier political economy journal, to be submitted for peer review in the first half of 2025.
Our intellectual point of departure is to consider two apparently conflicting phenomena in financial regulation in the post-2008 era. On one hand, many of today’s regulatory battles play out at the international or multilateral level, representing a process of market integration in which institutions such as the FSB and Basel Committee of Banking Supervision increasingly dominate both agenda-setting and implementation. The European Union has over the past decade also consolidated its role in cross-border financial regulation and supervision.
On the other hand, the FSB itself has remarked on the seemingly opposing process of regulatory “fragmentation.” There continues to be substantial national and sub-regional regulatory divergence, both globally and within the European Single Market. National policymakers continue to pass new policies that arguably further cement differences among competing regions and markets.
We seek to examine and uncover the mechanisms behind these dual processes. There are actors and processes at work in market integration and fragmentation that make this a topic ripe for investigation by an interdisciplinary group of scholars drawing on political economy methods and theory.
Some contributions will focus on bureaucratic-led policymaking occurring both in nations and multilateral institutions. Others will look to lobbying and other mechanisms of “instrumental power” that imply the ongoing involvement of elected officials in financial regulation. Still other scholars may wish to consider how far market integration processes, such as the one in the European Union and Eurozone in the past decade, have or have not disrupted prior relationships of association and power that characterised financial market regulation before the 2008 crisis. Scholarship addressing questions of regulatory authority, accountability, and subsidiarity in this area can provide key insights.
We stress, however, that our focus is not exclusively on Europe, and contributors may wish to consider integration or fragmentation processes occurring in other parts of the world, or indeed at other stages of economic development or historical moment. Moreover, while our primary intent is to analyse today’s political economy of financial regulation, we would be excited to see papers which draw parallels or undertake comparative investigation with other areas of regulatory governance, such as energy or consumer markets.
When putting together this call for interest, we asked each member of the scientific committee to come up with a broad question shaping their current thinking on these topics. These are:
- How do we reconcile technocratic expertise and knowledge and democratic accountability?
- As the public oversight of private banks takes a supranational turn, how are domestic politics responding to this development?
- Do cross-border firms always seek more globally integrated financial markets?
- Is financial fragmentation necessarily bad or can it make the financial system more resilient?
These questions are intended to provoke interest and debate, and we encourage participants to come up with their own questions and prompts related to these topics.
As an interdisciplinary and international community of scholars, the Finance and Society Interdisciplinary Research Cluster and the Robert Schuman Centre are particularly well-placed to put together this workshop. We are especially keen to ensure that this workshop, and the associated scientific output, attracts scholars from across the social sciences and draws on a diverse range of methods and intellectual approaches.
As stated, this event will take place 21-22 October 2024 on the EUI campus in Fiesole, just outside of Florence. All attendees must commit to the full workshop, which is expected to be 1.5 days in total (allowing people, as required, to arrive in Florence on the morning of the 21 October 2024).
In addition to presenting work that aligns with the overall intellectual project, they must also commit to the process of further refining and writing up an academic article, which will be submitted as part of a special edition of a political economy journal.
As a research initiative, we are also committed to supporting the next generation of political economy scholars. EUI PhD students will present work in progress in parallel sessions during the 2-day workshop, to which each attendee will be asked to provide oral and/or written feedback. Therefore, the time investment required by those who wish to attend will be substantial.
We invite those interested to first write to Harry Begg ([email protected]), who is a fellow at the Schuman Centre and the scientific committee member leading on the organisation of the workshop.
There is a small budget available for running this workshop and initiative. This should help to cover the running of the event on the EUI campus, and possibly provide some financial support for those in attendance who do not have a travel/research budget available from home institutions.
We look forward to hearing from you!
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