Research on financialization has been constrained by limited suitable measures for cases outside of the for-profit sector. Using the case of US higher education, we consider financialization as both increasing reliance on financial investment returns and increasing costs from transactions to acquire capital. We document returns and costs across four types of transactions: (i) revenues from endowment investments, (ii) interest payments on institutional borrowing by colleges, (iii) profits extracted by investors in for-profit colleges and (iv) interest payments on student loan borrowing by households. Estimated annual funding from endowment investments grew from $16 billion in 2003 to $20 billion in 2012. Meanwhile financing costs grew from $21 billion in 2003 to $48 billion in 2012, or from 5 to 9% of the total higher education spending, even as interest rates declined. Increases in financial returns, however, were concentrated at wealthy colleges whereas increases in financing costs tended to outpace returns at poorer institutions. We discuss the implications of the findings for resource allocation, organizational governance and stratification among colleges and households.

The worldwide financial crisis that began in 2007 was set off by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the USA. The crisis simultaneously reverberated to banks around the world, and eventually brought about a worldwide recession. The biggest banks in the developed world got in trouble because they were pursuing the same strategies to make profit as the American banks. They had joined the market in the USA for mortgage-backed securities and funded them by borrowing in the asset-backed commercial paper market. When the housing market turned down, they suffered the same fate as their US counterparts. Financial deregulation played a complex role in this process. Most of the banks that participated in this market came from countries where financial deregulation occurred. But not all banks from countries with financial deregulation entered this market. Countries with high levels of financial deregulation also experienced deeper recessions, suggesting that in the home market, banks had taken on riskier loans as well. Our study makes a broader theoretical point, suggesting that subsequent studies of global finance and financial markets need to consider the identities and strategies of the banks as their tactics explain a lot about how the global markets for different financial products are structured.

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In the early decades of the 19th century, physicians in the USA enjoyed unquestioned authority in medicine and increasing state recognition. But by mid-century, their monopoly had given way to a raucous free market for medical care. To explain the causes and consequences of this dismantling of a professional monopoly, we draw on political sociology. We argue that to maintain a monopoly, a dominant profession must defend its cultural authority against rival claims and preserve its institutional support from the state. A dominant profession can lose its monopoly if rival occupations mobilize to challenge its cultural authority and if populist political coalitions mobilize to repeal laws upholding professional monopolies. Our analysis, which covers all states in the Union by 1860, reveals that the dynamics of contention, both within the system of professions and in the wider political arena, can erode the foundations of professional monopolies.

We craft a historically sensitive model of entrepreneurship linking individual actors to the evolving social structures they must navigate to acquire resources and launch new ventures. Theories of entrepreneurship and industry evolution suggest two opposing hypotheses: as an industry develops, launching a new venture may become more difficult for all but industry insiders and the socially prominent because of competition from large incumbents, or it may become easier for all people because the legitimacy accorded to the industry simplifies the entrepreneurial task. To test these two conflicting claims, we study the American magazine industry from 1741 to 1860. We find that magazine publishing was originally restricted to publishing-industry insiders, professionals, and the highly educated, but most later founders came from outside publishing and more were of middling stature. Gains by entrepreneurs from the social periphery, however, were uneven: most were doctors and clergy without college degrees in small urban areas; magazines founded by industry insiders remained predominant in the industry centers. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of grounding studies of entrepreneurship in historical context. It also shows that entrepreneurship scholars must attend to temporal shifts within the focal industry and in society at large.In a pioneering analysis, Stinchcombe (1965) proposed that entrepreneurial dynamics are influenced by historical conditions. Large-scale changes such as urbanization, the creation of new policy regimes, and technological breakthroughs may change the resources available to entrepreneurs, altering organizational founding rates by transforming the entrepreneurial task itself. Yet much research on entrepreneurship remains ahistorical. It assumes that the factors that make people more or less likely to create new organizations do not