The Financial Thesis: Reconceptualizing Globalisation's Effect on Firms and Institutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationship between globalisation and institutional change is an issue frequently debated in economic geography and the social sciences. Some see firms, whatever their national culture or heritage, as facing common market forces that undermine self-determination and predict convergence towards a global best practice. Others are sceptical, arguing that different country-specific ‘varieties of capitalism’ have market-distorting effects, resulting in path dependence that limits the strength of global incentives to converge at the firm level. Others still are unconvinced by both these arguments. As such, this paper seeks to better understand globalisation's impact on institutions and firms by documenting the effect of global finance and its affiliated agents on institutions and firms. Specifically, I examine the experiences of firms in both Japan and the US that sponsor pension funds to see if they have had similar experiences and behaviours in both jurisdictions. I find that American and Japanese pension sponsors, despite clear manifestations of societal differences, have in fact had very similar experiences. So, some of the predictions held by path dependence and the varieties of capitalism are not confirmed in this case. However, because convergence towards a ‘best practice’ corporate pension offering is also rejected, the paper concludes that new research that focuses on the impact of financial markets on institutions and firms offers important insights for explaining the outcomes in both places.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".