Situating financialisation in the geographies of neoliberal housing restructuring: reflections from Ireland and Australia

The growing literature on housing financialisation offers an increasingly fine-grained analysis of how financial actors shape housing markets and systems internationally. Nevertheless, a lack of clarity remains about the geographical and temporally specific ways that financialisation grafts onto and amplifies wider neoliberal housing restructuring, as well as the role the global financial crisis (GFC) plays in its variegated trajectories. In this paper, we address this problematic by situating housing financialisation within the context of longer-term neoliberal restructuring via a comparative analysis of Ireland and Australia. Our empirical and conceptual aims are two-fold. First, we deploy our comparison to disentangle housing financialisation from wider processes of neoliberal restructuring and identify the moments in which financialisation acts as a crucial accelerant that amplifies but also mutates extant path dependent trajectories. Second we mobilise comparison to reflect critically on the role that crisis and crisis discourses play in facilitating regulatory restructuring through financialised logics. While in Ireland the crash formed a juncture for regulatory capture by financial actors and the deepening of financialisation as a core component of housing, Australia’s response to the GFC was a reassertion of the neoliberal status-quo. However, we contend that Australia’s housing markets are now characterised by many aspects of financialisation and remain vulnerable to its impacts. We argue that comparative analysis allows us to view the path dependent nature of neoliberal restructuring as well as the variegated geographies and temporalities of financialisation on housing regimes internationally.

IMPLEMENTATION OF INVESTMENT FUNDS SHARING AGREEMENT IN SHARIA BANKING SYSTEM IN INDONESIA

Mudharabah financing investment, also known as trust financing, is a method of distributing funds in Sharia banking to comply with the religious prohibition of interest on loans. However, the use of legal protection has not been maximized in increasing the growth of mudharabah financing investment products, especially for SMEs (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises), due to the complicated process of filing and guarantees needed by the bank. This study, therefore aims to implement adequate investment funds sharing agreement in Indonesia’s Sharia Banking System for mudharabah investments to be felt in all categories. The result showed that regulatory restructuring is needed for the application of mudharabah investment to be a real sector driver without eliminating the purity of Islamic principles.

Do Markets Reduce Costs? Assessing the Impact of Regulatory Restructuring on US Electric Generation Efficiency

While neoclassical models assume static cost-minimization by firms, agency models suggest that firms may not minimize costs in less-competitive or regulated environments. We test this using a transition from cost-of-service regulation to market-oriented environments for many US electric generating plants. Our estimates of input demand suggest that publicly owned plants, whose owners were largely insulated from these reforms, experienced the smallest efficiency gains, while investor-owned plants in states that restructured their wholesale electricity markets improved the most. The results suggest modest medium-term efficiency benefits from replacing regulated monopoly with a market-based industry structure. (JEL D24, L11, L51, L94, L98)