Financial Frontier Research Articles

Designing postcapitalist finance in Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression

Abstract Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression, the Economic Space Agency’s latest experiment in radical economic design, explores the possibility of designing a digitally native economy that is geared towards care, the arts, and the environment, and which not only refuses to give up on the financial frontiers of contemporary capitalism, but actively seeks to marshal them towards innovative ends. The architecture of a novel economic space comes into view through a set of protocols, which integrate economic information within a social value framework. This ‘Economic Space Protocol’ involves crafting a new grammar for economic information production processes that have traditionally been tied to competitive market behavior. This essay interrogates the place of finance in the book, emphasizing price discovery’s generativity with regards to information. What is necessary in the imagination of any postcapitalist future are radical design initiatives that contend with both the necessity and the limits of the price discovery process.

Unveiling the Future: Bancassurance as India's New Financial Frontier

This article describes the rapidly evolving bancassurance sector in India, impressing on its growth, challenges, and the way forward. It succinctly brings out how banks partner with insurance companies to increase penetration by the application of new technologies like AI and blockchain for more customer service and efficiency. It also discusses the regulatory and operational hurdles including the strategic role of Cost and Management Accountants (CMAs) in compliance and planning and provides some strategic and policy recommendations aimed at further empowering the development of the sector, thereby giving the stakeholders some useful insight into realizing bancassurance potential to the maximum.

Navigating Financial Frontiers in the Tourism Economies of Kosovo and Albania during and beyond COVID-19

The problem addressed in this study is the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the tourism economies of Kosovo (KOS) and Albania (AL), which led to economic–financial stagnation and price increases. The aim was to analyze the financial frontier challenges facing the tourism industry during COVID-19 and beyond and propose effective strategies for shaping a sustainable future for countries within Europe with great potential for tourism development in the current decade. The survey was conducted in 102 locations, including cities, municipalities, regions, villages, and neighborhoods in both countries over the years 2020–2023, while data analysis was performed using a cluster analysis (K-means and hierarchical) and the multidimensional scaling method (Alscal). The results highlighted (a) the severe impact of COVID-19 on both the population and businesses in the tourism sector, which will persist beyond the pandemic, (b) the indispensable role of government intervention in alleviating the financial crisis, (c) the need for innovative approaches and accurate financial management by both the country and businesses to attract tourists, and (d) the importance of control and management for financial sustainability. This paper is of significant importance to tourism destinations as it provides insights into the severe impact of COVID-19 on both the population and businesses in the tourism economies. By highlighting the indispensable role of government intervention, the need for innovative approaches and accurate financial management, and the importance of control and management for financial sustainability, the study offers valuable guidance for tourism destinations in navigating the current crisis and attracting tourists. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes the need for future studies to explore opportunities for long-term financial resilience and growth, contributing to the development of sustainable tourism destinations.

Unleashing the Power of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Algorithmic Trading in the Digital Financial Frontier and Enterprise Information Systems

Unleashing the Power of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Algorithmic Trading in the Digital Financial Frontier and Enterprise Information Systems

Navigating the financial frontier: a serendipitous journey between corpus linguistics and discourse analysis of economy in parliamentary speeches

In the esteemed chambers of Westminster, the United Kingdom’s members of Parliament engage in rigorous discourse regarding economic policies that have far-reaching consequences. The discourse analysis of their speeches helps us understand the formulation of financial regulations that align with the nation’s evolving needs and priorities. Nevertheless, discourse analysis has been criticised for being overtly biased in as much as it cherry-picks the linguistic features it seeks to examine within a data set. Hence, the present study aims to integrate corpus linguistic tools with discourse analysis methods to prepare representative data and to construct an objective pathway for analysis, thereby establishing an impartial avenue for scrutiny while mitigating the critiques often levelled against these two distinct approaches when employed in isolation. To realise these objectives, a corpus-assisted discourse study approach is applied, focusing on the procedural obstacles in the back-and-forth journey between quantitative and qualitative analysis of the discursive representations of the British economy. The study revealed that the integration of corpus tools and discourse methods helped prepare representative data for objective analysis. The integration, also, backed the triangulation of findings and showed that the parliamentarians concentrated on two main discourses of the British economy, namely finance and hardship. The analysis of the linguistic and collocational behaviour of these discourses uncovered that alleviation, scale and source were the three semantic categories of the discursive representation of the British economy.

Afterword of ‘Financial frontiers': towards conceptualizing finance that engages both power and contingency

ABSTRACT The critical and interdisciplinary scholarship analyzing finance, and specifically the relationship between financialization and inequality, has ballooned over the past twenty years. The increasing power and influence of financial and investment values, practices, policies, and networks have worked to leverage existing inequalities and construct novel regimes of accumulation that have increased socioeconomic precarity and dismantled socioeconomic protections for most. This fraught and unequal landscape has reinvigorated scholarly research and discussion on the role of finance in capitalism and on finance's relationship to other historical processes of inequality. Not surprisingly, much of this work on finance has faced similar questions and pitfalls as the critical scholarship on capitalism, namely, how to represent, analyze, and account for finance's power and influence without over-empowering, totalizing, presuming, or rendering inevitable finance's ability to remake the world in its own image. This Afterword engages this quandary, arguing that a dual approach is necessary – one that simultaneously shows finance's local contingencies, historical specificities, and unexpected trajectories alongside an approach that demonstrates finance's catalyzation of longstanding unequal structures produced through racial capitalism and colonialism to intensify contemporary inequality.

Compounding financial frontiers: capital seeds and seeds for capital

ABSTRACT More than fifty years of civil war has left about eight million internally displaced people in Colombia, with millions struggling to make a living in new precarious urban spaces. Illicit narcoparamilitary groups, also emergent from the conflict, have dispossessed millions from their land and become vital moneylenders that enable displaced people to work and subsist in cities while profiting from them. Using the metaphor of compounding, I suggest thinking of financial frontiers as consecutive processes of expansive economic growth where one asset or principal (land dispossession and rural displacement in the Colombian case) originates exponential profits over time, benefiting narcoparamilitary groups. Such exponential gain happens gradually in circular financial transactions. Each transaction produces extra profits and opens possibilities for new financial transactions that further extract value from displacement and land dispossession. This approach helps us understand the social relations that permit capital accumulation over long periods, across geographic spaces, through political changes, and through economic shifts that determine the development of novel forms of financial power in Colombia and beyond. This article proposes a concept of compounding financial frontiers to grasp how new spaces for financial value extraction emerge and how capitalism finds the conditions for its reproduction.

Slavery and incarceration in the frontier: the origin of convict leasing

ABSTRACT This article uses original archival research to revise the scholarly consensus on convict leasing to demonstrate that it first emerges on US soil in Kentucky’s eighteenth century frontier society (rather than in the Deep South in the wake of the 13th amendment) and that it began in a prison filled with incarcerated white people (rather than as a way to keep African Americans trapped in a condition analogous to slavery). Convict leasing was born on the frontier – in the hazy netherworld between slavery and freedom, between British colonial geographies and the territories settlers seized from indigenous peoples to establish a sovereign republic. I argue that convict leasing constituted a novel financial frontier that tethered slaveholding to new strategies for adjudicating debt to new lease arrangements for private firms. More specifically, I argue that convict leasing was inaugurated in the US in Kentucky because of its unique relationship to three related developments: the birth of the domestic slave trade, the debut of incarceration as a pervasive mode of punishment, and the plight of debtors in the aftermath of the American Revolution. This article demonstrates how Kentucky moved from being foremost understood as a geographic frontier – the expanding boundary of a new republic – to a financial frontier as the westward march of slave coffles prepared Kentucky to launch a hemp industry that was uniquely profitable. The desperate plight of debtors in the context of booming hemp profits made them especially vulnerable to Joel Scott’s innovative model for extracting profit from prison labor based on techniques African workers had developed for transforming a recalcitrant plant into an economic marvel. In this context, incarcerated white people were subjected to a labor regimen that had heretofore largely been restricted to enslaved black workers. This geographic frontier and financial frontier ushered in new legal frontiers, including the threshold marking a shift from colonial subjects to incarcerated citizens.

A financial frontier for Catalonia: nationalism in times of austerity

ABSTRACT During a period of pro-independence mass mobilizations and diminishing financial confidence, the government of Catalonia attached a traditional idea of the rural household to its market in public debt. This article analyzes how nationalistic understandings of household are mobilized to support the struggle for independence and promote austerity policies. It also examines how an ethos of Catalan kinship drives the expansion of the household frontier of finance into the political imagination of the nation. The ethnographic story of this article is about a bond that transferred 30 percent of the region’s public liabilities from institutional investors to Catalan households between 2010 and 2014. I trace out the commercial life of this bond from government offices to bank branches to a small rural town near Barcelona. This approach to financialization shows that the reconstitution of the household as another sphere of market relations has been reoriented after the 2008 financial crisis. My main argument suggests that the financialization of the household in Spain facilitates the making of a financial frontier for Catalonia in which widespread fiscal discontent is transformed into political capital.

Trusts at the financial frontier: the flickering forms of property, water, and governance

ABSTRACT Financialization is often understood as an expansive, spreading wave, coming from an energetic, global center of finance and creating new financial frontiers at its edges. Instead of presuming this expansive wave, I show how financial frontiers are flickering arrangements. Rather than spreading continuously, financial frontiers come into being, go dormant, and reignite with intensity. This temporal dynamic becomes apparent when we trace the specific techno-legal devices that proliferate at financial frontiers. I focus on the financial trust, an instrument that, despite its prominence in financial circles, has received comparatively little attention beyond legal scholarship. I chart three historical moments in Costa Rica when the trust appears as a frontier device opening the nature of property, enabling the transformation of ecological processes into sources of rent, and redrawing relations between public and private actors interested in water protection. At these flickering frontiers, the trust does much more than channel and shield financial wealth. As a device, the trust makes fundamental assumptions about social life explicit and opens possibilities for some actors to translate those assumptions into social forms.

What is a financial frontier?

What is a financial frontier?

Forecasting the Risk Factor of Frontier Markets: A Novel Stacking Ensemble of Neural Network Approach

Forecasting the risk factor of the financial frontier markets has always been a very challenging task. Unlike an emerging market, a frontier market has a missing parameter named “volatility”, which indicates the market’s risk and as a result of the absence of this missing parameter and the lack of proper prediction, it has almost become difficult for direct customers to invest money in frontier markets. However, the noises, seasonality, random spikes and trends of the time-series datasets make it even more complicated to predict stock prices with high accuracy. In this work, we have developed a novel stacking ensemble of the neural network model that performs best on multiple data patterns. We have compared our model’s performance with the performance results obtained by using some traditional machine learning ensemble models such as Random Forest, AdaBoost, Gradient Boosting Machine and Stacking Ensemble, along with some traditional deep learning models such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term (BiLSTM). We have calculated the missing parameter named “volatility” using stock price (Close price) for 20 different companies of the frontier market and then made predictions using the aforementioned machine learning ensemble models, deep learning models and our proposed stacking ensemble of the neural network model. The statistical evaluation metrics RMSE and MAE have been used to evaluate the performance of the models. It has been found that our proposed stacking ensemble neural network model outperforms all other traditional machine learning and deep learning models which have been used for comparison in this paper. The lowest RMSE and MAE values we have received using our proposed model are 0.3626 and 0.3682 percent, respectively, and the highest RMSE and MAE values are 2.5696 and 2.444 percent, respectively. The traditional ensemble learning models give the highest RMSE and MAE error rate of 20.4852 and 20.4260 percent, while the deep learning models give 15.2332 and 15.1668 percent, respectively, which clearly states that our proposed model provides a very low error value compared with the traditional models.

Microcredit and the Financial Frontiers of Racial Neoliberalism

Over the past decades of neoliberal globalization, microcredit has been a widely supported project that claims to address global poverty, inequality, and uneven development through debt-based solutions involving small interest-bearing loans that can be used to fund small-scale business entrepreneurship. Microcredit’s promise, though never fulfilled, reflects an approach to development within a broader shift toward financial capitalism, privatization through individualized debt creation, and shrinkage of the social state. Moreover, microcredit (more broadly, microfinance) seeks legitimation in narratives of inclusion, participation, and gender empowerment. In fact, social capital belonging to the targeted populations of microcredit programs in the “global South” is itself often tapped in the service of value extraction. This article forwards a view of microcredit as operating within a logic of racial capitalism. The approach seeks to ground critiques of microcredit’s core neoliberal elements within a longer history and broader appreciation of racialized and colonial structures of finance.

A financial frontier model with bankers' susceptibility under uncertainty

AbstractThis article aims to refine the Post Keynesian long run financial frontier models under an intermediate run called the ‘implementation period,’ the time horizon to finance and implement long run strategic plans. During this period, the availability of debt finance is crucial to bridge the time gap before future free cash flows validate the investment. Therefore, firms' long run investment plans may be modified or suspended during this time horizon subject to bankers' uncertainty perception and state of confidence, which constrain debt capacity and firms' investment decisions. Uncertainty and the measures to enhance confidence, such as banking convention, mimetic behaviours, and bankers' spontaneous optimism, are critical to determining the financial frontier because they affect the lending amount, tenor, and refinancing potential. The proposed model focussing on bankers' convention and susceptibility explains the volatile nature of the financial frontier, investment instability, downward sloping effective loan supply and credit rationing under new perspectives.

The color of money at the financial frontier

This article takes up recent calls to further problematize race in international political economy by focusing on money at the frontier of global finance. We draw upon the Black radical tradition’s theoretical formulations of racial capitalism, which we bring into dialogue with conceptualizations of money and finance as developed within the critique of political economy. Money is the most supreme and abstract incarnation of wealth and class power, yet it is also suffused with racial and colonial logics of differentiation. To explore this tension, we offer a relational-comparison of two sites of frontier finance, namely cross-border investment and digital financial inclusion in developing countries. We trace the mechanisms through which race affects the operations of money and finance across these two sites. We argue that racialized difference is mobilized and reproduced at three key moments in the construction of investibility at the financial frontier: (1) the re/making of a development ‘problem’; (2) the construction of racialized ideal-typical financial subjects; and (3) processes of risk valuation and the legitimation of surveillance, discipline, and extraction. This allows us to characterize the color of money at the financial frontier as a particularly potent and violent combination of the abstractive powers of race and money.

Crypto and digital currencies - nine research priorities.

To avert privacy breaches, scams and environmental damage, governments and central banks need to know how best to regulate this financial frontier. To avert privacy breaches, scams and environmental damage, governments and central banks need to know how best to regulate this financial frontier.

A contested financial frontier: banking and empire building in Eritrea,c.1952–73

AbstractThis article provides an account of the relationship between imperial Ethiopia and Eritrea in the realm of banking governance from the start of the federation to the last years of the imperial regime. It looks in particular at the relationship between the Ethiopian administrations and an Italian bank, Banco di Roma, which had its headquarters in Eritrea from 1948 to 1967 before moving to Addis Ababa. The struggle for control of the economic flows generated by the Italian bank is an index of the changes in centre–periphery linkages between Addis Ababa and the sub-regional centre of Asmara. Archival evidence highlights the multifaced nature of Ethiopian governance and the role performed by the Italian institution in providing alternative sources of diplomatic leverage and wealth accumulation to the Eritrean elite. It is argued that the extraterritorial status enjoyed by Banco di Roma until 1967 was actively tolerated by a section of the Ethiopian establishment, which resorted to an established pattern of imperial governance based on flexibility in return for tribute. This centre–periphery arrangement was harshly opposed by prominent Ethiopian officials from the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Ethiopia, who struggled to enforce tighter government control over capital flows within and across the country's borders. The National Bank's final success in the quest for financial centralization drained significant resources out of Eritrea, with adverse effects on the preservation of thepax aethiopicain the former Italian colony.

Navigating Financial Frontiers: Corporate Finance Management and the Evolving Banking System

This comprehensive exploration delves into the dynamic landscape of corporate finance management and the banking system, meticulously examining their historical roots, current state, and future trajectories. The article offers a nuanced understanding of the intricate interplay between corporations and the banking sector, encompassing key aspects such as the pivotal role of technology, emerging trends, persistent challenges, and the potential evolution of financial systems. The analysis begins with an insightful review of foundational works, such as Schmidt and Tyrell's examination of financial systems' impact on corporate decision-making and governance frameworks, and Boot and Marinč's study on the evolving nature of banking institutions. These foundational perspectives set the stage for a deeper exploration into the strategic shifts within corporate and private banking, as articulated by Hamzaee and Wold, shedding light on the adaptive strategies required for financial institutions in the face of a rapidly changing economic environment. Further, the article delves into contemporary issues with a focus on the Squam Lake Report, where influential economists collaboratively present a roadmap for fixing systemic flaws in the financial system. This forward-looking approach aligns with Stulz's examination of the crucial link between financial structure and economic growth, providing a comprehensive cross-country perspective that considers diverse banking systems and their impact on national economic development. A critical examination of the Japanese and Australian financial systems by Hoshi and Edey respectively adds a regional dimension to the exploration, uncovering the unique characteristics, challenges, and evolution of financial landscapes beyond the global mainstream. Simultaneously, Kamath et al.'s analysis of the challenges and opportunities within the Indian banking sector contributes a granular perspective on a rapidly growing and dynamic financial ecosystem. The review also spotlights the political underpinnings of American corporate finance, as expounded by Roe in his seminal works. Roe's political theory lens provides a thought-provoking analysis of the power dynamics shaping corporate governance structures in the United States, offering valuable insights into the historical roots that continue to influence the American financial landscape. In conclusion, this article aims to provide a comprehensive and forward-looking exploration of the dynamic landscape of corporate finance and the banking system. By synthesizing historical perspectives, contemporary analyses, and future trajectories, it offers a holistic understanding of the multifaceted relationships and forces shaping the intricate world of finance. Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners stand to gain valuable insights into the complexities and opportunities that define the present and future of corporate finance and banking.

Financialising the frontier: Harish City

Housing and settlement played a key role in the formation of an Israeli society and its territorial project. While earlier frontier settlement relied on the rural sector and on peripheral development towns, with the liberalisation and privatisation of the local economy it was incorporated in the nationwide suburbanisation process. Eventually, with the neoliberal turn, the state sought to redirect investors, entrepreneurs, developers, and families to frontier areas by creating a real estate market and thus financialising the national territorial enterprise. This paper focuses on Harish, a rapidly developing housing project on the border with the occupied Palestinian West-Bank (the Green-Line). Presenting the geopolitical and societal interests behind its development, as well as the transformations its planning processes went through, this paper shows how the state was able to financialise its frontier and to eventually domesticate its border area. Analysing the spatial characteristics of Harish, this paper explains how the built environment functioned both as the medium and outcome of the alliance between national interests and market economy, merging financial frontiers with economic ones.

The Kabuliwalas: Afghan moneylending and the credit cosmopolis of British India, c. 1880–1947

Immortalised in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story ‘The Kabuliwala’, the Afghan moneylender has appeared in many studies about rural and urban India as an unwanted interloper. This article presents an alternative picture. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, Afghans regularly visited the financial frontiers of British India where they offered collateral-free loans with high interest rates to urban and rural communities on the fringes of respectable creditors, such as banks, cooperative societies and banking networks. More than simply predatory, Afghan moneylenders provided a micro-financial service when and where no one else would. As a result, Afghan moneylending operations, considered as a whole, provide insight into the cosmopolitan nature of credit relationships among the working poor in the colonial era and how social and cultural notions informed not only those relationships but also how the imperial government and its allies understood them. Beginning with the Great Depression, novel legal regimes emerged around the subcontinent aimed at eradicating Afghan moneylending and solving the social problems associated with it. In the process, the intrusion of the state into informal finance via regulation hampered deep historical patterns of interregional social connectivity and redefined the cosmopolitanism of credit relations in the informal sectors of the economy.