A THEORY OF THE FINANCIALIZED FIRM Firm Boundaries and Contracting Relations Professor Adam Leaver & Dr Keir Martin ISRF Political Economy Research Fellows Adam Leaver is Professor in Financialization and Business Analysis at Alliance Manchester Business School | Keir Martin is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo
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number of recent corporate scandals highlight the widespread use of tiered holding companies and complex financial arrangements at many national and international firms. Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Apple and others show that many large companies use such structures to minimise reported net income in certain jurisdictions to evict the taxation claims of the local state. Similarly the recent example of British Home Stores (BHS) shows that a firm need not be particularly profitable for owners to take significant amounts of money out of it. Intercompany loans, transfer payments, intellectual property charges, and special dividends are now common features of mainstream corporate practice, with firms increasingly treated instrumentally as conduits between debt markets and owner returns; as instruments of extraction rather than sites of profit generation. These examples have each become isolated public interest issues, but to date there has been no attempt to locate such practices historically, nor connect them theoretically. There is now an
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