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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate financialisation
• corporate sectors
• non-financial corporations
• shareholder payouts
• shareholder value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ssm.pr201215~4742ea7c8a.en.html.

2 https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups.

3 https://www.ft.com/content/85badd19-c52c-4062-88f0-4ea679c52a3a.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Foundation Flanders [G079718N].

Notes on contributors

Diliara Valeeva

Diliara Valeeva is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, where she works on corporate financialisation and corporate networks. Her work appeared in Social Networks, Applied Economics, Development and Change, International Sociology, PlosOne.

Tobias J. Klinge

Tobias J. Klinge is a PhD candidate at KU Leuven, where he works on financialisation of non-financial corporations. His work appeared in Geography Compass and Globalizations.

Manuel B. Aalbers

Manuel B. Aalbers is a professor of Human Geography at KU Leuven where he leads a research group on the intersection of real estate, finance and states. He is the author of Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach (Routledge, 2016).