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In Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and Sweden in the 1980s, coalitions of politicians, fiscal bureaucrats, and capital and labor in sectors exposed to international competition allied to transform the largest single nontradables sector in their society: the state, particularly the welfare state. They exposed state personnel and agencies to market pressures and competition to reduce the cost of welfare and other state services. The impetus for change came from rising foreign public and private debt. Rising public debt levels and expensive welfare states interacted to create a tax wedge between employers' wage costs and workers' received wages. This undercut international competitiveness, worsening current account deficits and leading to more foreign debt accumulation. Two factors explain variation in the degree of reorganization in each country: differences in their electoral and constitutional regimes; and the willingness of left parties to risk splitting their core constituencies. Introduction of market pressures is an effort to go beyond the liberalization of the economy common in industrial countries during the 1980s, and both to institutionalize limits to welfare spending and to change the nature of statesociety relations, away from corporatist forms of interest intermediation. In short, not just less state, but a different state.

W killed the growth of the welfare state? Its seemingly inexorable budgetary, programmatic, and personnel growth in the 1960s and 1970s ground to a halt in the 1980s, accompanied by the mutilation of programmes and rising unemployment. Was it an external intruder-globalization of one sort or another? Was it an inside job-domestic politics and demography? Or, as public choice theory suggests, was death self-inflicted by a combination of producer and client groups? As if this richness of suspects were not problem enough, the identity of the victim is also uncertain. In fact, the central mystery in the relationship between globalization and the welfare state is accurately identifying the victim; it is a mystery of concept formation in which, prosaically, no one is quite sure which dependent variable matters and how it is changing. Spending levels? Policies? Institutions? Wage equality? Employment levels? National autonomy? Two academic deformations of reality obscure the politics at the heart of this specific mystery. First, the richness of prior research on the formal or overt welfare state-systems of tax funded transfers and state provided or funded social services ameliorating life and economic risks for workersprovides a lamppost around which enquiries naturally cluster, asking how 'globalization' has affected those programmes, but ignoring areas of darkness away from the lamp. Second, a profound normative bias favouring welfare in most welfare state research obscures the fact that not all welfare is for workers, that the welfare state was never simply an instrumental tool for advancing labour's interests, and that 'welfare'-understood much more broadly as 'social protection'-was about sheltering all income streams, I thank Aida Hozic and David Waldner, respectively, for many long discussions of the film industry and social sciences in which they raised this alarm. Other useful comments came from

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.Financial Disclosure/funding: Some research for this article was facilitated by the Bankard and Sesquicentennial Funds of the University of Virginia. Keywords: Welfare state, deregulation, mortgages, pensions, securitizationHousing, the welfare state, and the global financial crisis: what is the connection? Abstract:Analyses of the global financial crisis that assign causality to the erosion of parts of the welfare state that protected individuals miss the importance of macro-level regulation that protected firms and the financial system from itself. Post-Depression macro-level regulation of finance prevented the emergence of mismatched maturities where deposits lacked state guarantees, and thus prevented runs on banks or near-banks. A balance sheet approach shows that macro-regulation linked long duration liabilities in housing finance (mortgages) to long duration assets (pensions). Deregulation permitted the reemergence of mismatched maturities, providing both a necessary and sufficient condition for the current financial crisis.

What explains the unexpected, uneven, but unquestionably pervasive trend towards re--familialization in the rich OECD countries? The usual arguments about political responses to rising income inequality, unstable families, and unstable employment predicted that the state would increasingly shelter people against risk, producing greater individuation and de-- rather than re--familialization. By contrast, we argue three things. First, re--familialization has replaced de--familialization. Second, unequal access to housing drives a large part of re--familialization. Rather than becoming more 'anglo--nordic,' countries are becoming more 'southern european' in the way that younger cohorts access housing. Third, this inequality driven insecurity and unequal access is felt differently not only between generational cohorts but also within cohorts.

Are club goods becoming more widespread in developed economies, and, if so, what is the broader significance of this trend? Club goods are as salient for the profitability of non-financial firms as for finance. First, corporate strategy today largely revolves around the generation or acquisition of intellectual property rights and other club/franchise goods. Second, financialization is not just about the credit relationship between financial firms on the one side and non-financial corporate and household borrowers on the other, but also about Main Street's ability to use financial power to suppress competition in its own markets. Third, firms’ strategic reliance on IPRs and club goods more generally has magnified both profit and wage inequality in the broader economy. This inequality combines with changes in corporate structure to produce a significant part of the household level income inequality we currently observe in the United States. Fourth, all these processes are ineluctably political, because the state necessarily constitutes club or franchise goods, just like any property right. But the quantity and quality of those property rights is an indeterminate outcome of struggles among firms over the size of and shares of the pool of profits in a given national and global economy.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. How did US housing markets articulate both with global financial flows and US domestic politics? During the long 1990s, the US economy benefited from a system of global financial arbitrage in which the US economy as a whole borrowed short term, at low interest rates, from the rest of the world, while lending back long term at higher. A temporarily self sustaining housing market boom in the US based on declining nominal interest rates emerged from these flows. This boom favored employment and GDP growth in the US at the expense of some but not all advanced economies. The more that housing market financial structures in an economy approximated those in the US (widespread homeownership, high levels of mortgage debt to GDP, low transaction costs for Schwartz -CEP special issue -p. 2 Permanent

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