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Starting around the early 2000s, and especially after the 2008 crisis, the rate of capital accumulation for US nonfinancial corporations has slowed down despite relatively high profitability; indicating a weakening of the link between profitability and investment. While the literature mostly focuses on financialisation and globalisation as the reasons behind this slowdown, I suggest adding another layer to these explanations and argue that, in conjunction with financialisation and globalisation, we need to pay attention to the increased use of intangible assets by nonfinancial corporations in the last two decades. Intangibles such as brand names, trademarks, patents and copyrights play a role in the widening of the profit–investment gap as the use of these assets enables firms to increase market power and profitability without necessarily generating a corresponding increase in fixed capital investment. After discussing the ways nonfinancial corporations use intangible assets, I look at large corporations in the USA and find the following: (i) The ratio of intangible assets to the capital stock increased in general. This increase is highest for firms in high-technology, healthcare, nondurables and telecommunications. (ii) Industries with higher intangible asset ratios have lower investment to profit ratios. (iii) Industries with higher intangible asset ratios have higher markups and profitability. (iv) The composition of the nonfinancial corporate sector has changed and the weight of high-technology and healthcare firms has increased; but this increase did not correspond to an equal increase in their investment share. The decline in the investment share of durables, nondurables and machinery is matched by an increase in the investment share of location-specific industries with low intangible asset use, most notably firms in energy extraction. In general, these firms have steadier markups and higher investment to profit ratios. (v) Yet, intangible-intensive industries’ profitability has increased faster than their share of investment or total assets. All in all, these findings are in line with the suggestion that the increased use of intangible assets enables firms to have high profitability without a corresponding increase in investment.

By the end of 2018 Turkey had entered a new economic crisis and a lengthy recession period. In contrast to the previous financial crises of 1994, 2001 and 2009, when the economy shrank abruptly with a spectacular collapse of asset values and a severe contraction of output, the 2018 economic crisis was characterized by a prolonged recession with persistent low (negative) rates of growth, dwindling investment performance, debt repayment problems, secularly rising unemployment, spiralling currency depreciation and high inflation. The mainstream approach attributes this dismal performance to a lack of 'structural reforms' and/or exogenous policy factors. However, this analysis shows that the underlying sources of the crisis are to be found not in the conjunctural cycles of reform fatigue, but rather in the post-2001, neoliberal, speculation-led growth model that relied excessively on hot-money inflows and external debt accumulation. This article argues that following the post-2001 orthodox reforms, a foreign capital inflow-dependent, debtled and construction-centred economic growth model dominated the economy and caused a long build-up of imbalances and increased fragilities that led to the 2018 crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21 further exposed these fragilities, pushing the economy back into a recession with rapid capital outflows causing another round of sharp currency depreciation. 2. 'Justice and Development Party' is the English translation of Turkey's Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), founded in 2001 and in power continuously since the end of 2002. For historical reviews of the rise of the AKP see, for example, Esen and Gümüşçü (2016); Yeldan and Ünüvar (2016); Yılmaz and Bashirov (2018). 3. This model has variously been characterized as dependent financialization (Akçay and Güngen, 2019), deficit-led neoliberal populism (Güven, 2016), or a mix of neoliberal developmentalism and authoritarian populism (Adaman et al., 2019).

In this paper, we study the consequences of the 2000-2001 financial crisis in Turkey to identify the impacts of the crisis on capital and labor. We uncover three significant empirical effects of this crisis. First, international capital benefited from the crisis by both increasing its total assets in Turkey and income flows from these assets, while large domestic financial capitalists also increased their profits in the aftermath of the crisis. Second, industrial capital benefited via a repression of labor. Third, the attempt to 'remedy' the economy by imposing structural changes furthered the interests of capital in general.

Literature on capital flows identifies various channels through which capital inflows could create financial fragility and economic instability in “developing and emerging economies.” Domestic credit expansion is one such channel. Capital inflows can lead to rapid expansion of domestic credit, even create credit bubbles, and thus result in an increased fragility of the economy. I analyze the link between private capital inflows and bank credit to the private sector in the case of Turkey between 2003 and 2013 and ask whether surges in private capital inflows accelerate growth of credit. I employ a logit model to investigate the link between capital inflows and periods of rapid credit expansion. The findings suggest that net private capital inflows, after controlling for other determinants of credit, are positively correlated with periods of rapid credit expansion.

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A recent series of academic studies, think-tank reports, and news articles shows widespread attention to rising industrial concentration and market power in the U.S. economy. In this paper, we focus on concentration in the U.S. nonfinancial corporate sector to make three contributions to the literature. First, we use examples from the debate on industrial concentration to show that there are often-divergent predictions in the theoretical literature surrounding the expected consequences of concentration and monopolization for nonfinancial firms. Second, we use industry-level concentration data to describe recent trends in average concentration. We show that, while concentration increases across the majority of industries after the late 1990s, the retail and information-services sectors are particularly key for understanding recent trends in average industrial concentration. Third, we link our industry-level analysis with firm-level data to describe the relationship between industrial concentration and nonfinancial corporations’ profitability, markups, and investment. Consistent with the ambiguities in the theoretical literature, we find that these relationships are not uniform: while some highly concentrated industries confirm standard expectations with high markups, high profitability, and low investment rates, other highly concentrated industries earn lower-than-average markups and profits, suggesting that – in some industries – increased concentration and intensified competition may go hand in hand.