Bonnie Braun
Biographic Data
| ID | 109165 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bonnie Braun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bonnie |
| FAMILY NAME | Braun |
| SIGNATURE | BRAUN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5186-5923 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 639 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Best of times, worst of times: Record fossil-fuel profits, inflation and inequality
The 2022 oil and gas crisis resulted in record fossil-fuel profits globally that rehabilitated the oil and gas industry, obstructed the energy transition and contributed to inflation, but their magnitude and beneficiaries have been insufficiently understood. Here we show the size of profits across countries and their distribution across socio-economic groups within the United States, using company income statements, comprehensive ownership data a…
Green macrofinancial regimes
Noisy Politics, Quiet Technocrats: Strategic Silence by Central Banks
In contrast to the “quiet” politics of the pre‐2008 period, macroeconomic policy has become “noisy”. This break raises a question: How do independent agencies designed for quiet politics react when a contentious public turns the volume up on them? Central banks provide an interesting case because while they are self‐professed adherents to communicative transparency, individual case studies have documented their use of strategic silence as a defen…
Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank
Monetary and financial integration has been shown to increase the pressure on states to liberalize social and labor market policies. If structures do not come with instruction sheets, how do monetary regime pressures translate into policy? Through a case study of the euro area, we show that central banks play an underappreciated role in this process. Using mixed methods to analyze a large amount of data, including the complete corpus of speeches,…
Asset manager capitalism: An introduction to its political economy and economic geography
Asset manager capitalism; political economy; economic geography; finance
Planning laissez-faire: Supranational central banking and structural reforms
The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Although Polanyi has been a key reference point for the debate on the social consequences of Eur…
Fueling Financialization: The Economic Consequences of Funded Pensions
Keywords pension funds, financialization, asset manager capitalism, capital stewardship, labor's capital
Exit, Control, and Politics: Structural Power and Corporate Governance under Asset Manager Capitalism
The power of finance vis-à-vis the nonfinancial sector is changing. Macroeconomic developments and financial innovations have reduced financial actors' exit options, thus diminishing exit-based structural power. At the same time, shareholdings have become more concentrated in the hands of large asset managers, thus increasing control-based power. This article documents these trends, before examining whether asset managers wield their power and wh…
Asset Manager Capitalism as a Corporate Governance Regime
For too long, students of the political economy of corporate governance have been enthralled by the language of ownership and control. This language stems from Berle and Means (1932), who observed that trust-busting policies and the diversification of robber-baron fortunes had dispersed stock ownership in the United States, while concentrating corporate control in the hands of a small class of managers. 1 Jensen and Meckling’s (1976) agency theor…
Financial globalization as positive integration: Monetary technocrats and the Eurodollar market in the 1970s
International political economy (IPE) has explained financial globalization as the result of states deciding to open up and liberalize domestic financial systems. Complementing this ‘negative integration’ view, we present a theory of financial globalization during the 1970s that emphasizes the importance of ‘positive integration.’ Credit money systems are characterized by public-private infrastructural entanglements, the management of which requi…
Strong Firms, Weak Banks: The Financial Consequences of Germany’s Export-Led Growth Model
The financial foundation of Germany's manufacturing success, according to the comparative capitalism literature, is an ample supply of long-term capital, provided to firms by a three-pillar banking system and 'patient' domestic shareholders. This premise also informs the recent literature on growth models, which documents a shift towards a purely export-led growth model in Germany since the 1990s. We challenge this common assumption of continuity…
Central banking and the infrastructural power of finance: The case of ECB support for repo and securitization markets
The pre-crisis rise and post-crisis resilience of European repo and securitization markets represent political victories for the interests of large banks. To explain when and how finance wins, the literature emphasizes lobbying capacity (instrumental power) and the financial sector's central position in the economy (structural power). Increasingly, however, finance also enjoys infrastructural power, which stems from entanglements between specific…
Loneliness and Social Isolation—A Private Problem, A Public Issue
Social support needs of breast cancer patients without partners
This qualitative study investigated how women without partners navigate social support challenges following their breast cancer diagnoses. In-depth interviews were used for collection. Twenty women without partners discussed the supportive and unsupportive roles their relatives, peers, and colleagues played during diagnoses and treatment. Family systems theory guided the construction of interview questions. Thematic analysis uncovered the followi…
Governing through financial markets: Towards a critical political economy of Capital Markets Union
Capital Markets Union is a large-scale political project to strengthen and further integrate European market-based finance. An initiative of the European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker’s leadership, Capital Markets Union seeks to realize a long-standing goal of European policy makers: a financial system in which capital markets will absorb more of citizens’ savings and play a greater role in corporate finance. Market-based banking, too, is …
Rethinking agency in International Relations: Performativity, Performances and Actor-Networks
Single Female Breast Cancer Patients' Perspectives on Intimate Relationships
This qualitative study examined how female breast cancer patients without partners conceptualized their relationship status. Qualitative data were collected from 20 participants who did not have partners during diagnosis and treatment. Phenomenology informed the methodology and thematic analysis. Breast cancer patients without partners discussed how they made meaning of their relationship status within the context of their cancer experience and b…
Assessing health literacy and oral health: Preliminary results of a multi‐site investigation
Our analysis showed that dental school patients exhibit a range of health literacy abilities. It also revealed that the relationship between health literacy and oral health is not straightforward, depending on patient characteristics and the unique circumstances of the encounter. We anticipate future analyses of MOHLRS data will answer questions about the role that health literacy and various mediating factors play in explaining oral health dispa…
Speaking to the people? Money, trust, and central bank legitimacy in the age of quantitative easing
Financial upheaval and unconventional monetary policies have made money a salient political issue. This provides a rare opportunity to study the under-appreciated role of monetary trust in the politics of central bank legitimacy which, for the first time in decades, appears fragile. While research on central bank communication with 'the markets' abounds, little is known about if and how central bankers speak to 'the people.' A closer look at the …
From performativity to political economy: Index investing, ETFs and asset manager capitalism
As a discipline, political economy has often been reluctant to engage with the details of market devices and practices. This weakens the microfoundations of its analysis of capitalist macro-dynamics and cedes unnecessarily large stretches of intellectual territory to economics. The performativity approach developed by Michel Callon offers a theoretical way out of this dual dilemma. It allows political economists to study 'the economy' directly by…
Governing the future: The European Central Bank’s expectation management during the Great Moderation
The experience of the global financial crisis has sparked renewed interest in the role of futurity in the capitalist economy in general and in the formation and coordination of expectations under uncertainty in particular. Economic sociologists have carefully studied the 'defuturizing' technologies devised by private actors, but have tended to neglect the increasingly pivotal part played by central banks. Political economists have had more to say…
Understanding Health Insurance Literacy: A Literature Review
The 2010 Affordable Care Act changed health insurance plans for both the insured and uninsured. Currently insured consumers need to understand changes that impact their purchase decisions, and newly eligible consumers need to understand how to purchase through the new health insurance marketplace. Health insurance literacy is a new concept that addresses the extent to which consumers can make informed purchase and use decisions. Consumers current…
Preparedness, Crisis Management and Policy Change: The Euro Area at the Critical Juncture of 2008–2013
Research Highlights and Abstract This article contributes to the literature on ideational and institutional change at critical junctures more generally, and in the context of economic crises in particular. In the context of explosive economic crises critical junctures should be conceptualised as consisting of two distinct phases—a phase of emergency crisis management and a subsequent phase of purposeful institution building. The analytical signif…
Having Their Say: Rural Mothers Talk about Welfare
The public's perception of persons who rely on public assistance is generally negative. The surprising element is that mothers who are themselves reliant on welfare also hold these negative attitudes. This paper explored the attitudes toward and experiences with welfare of rural low income mothers using data from the Rural Families Speak longitudinal, multi‐state project. Consistent with prior research, the majority of rural mothers spoke dispara…
Depression and Poverty Among Rural Women: A Relationship of Social Causation or Social Selection
Context and Purpose: Depression among rural women is a major public health concern. The purpose of this study was to test the competing theories of social causation and social selection to assess the relationship between depression and economic status for a sample of rural, low‐income women in the United States. Methods: Structural equation modeling was used to analyze data from Rural Families Speak, a US Department of Agriculture‐funded multi‐st…
Central banking and the infrastructural power of finance: The case of ECB support for repo and securitization markets
The pre-crisis rise and post-crisis resilience of European repo and securitization markets represent political victories for the interests of large banks. To explain when and how finance wins, the literature emphasizes lobbying capacity (instrumental power) and the financial sector's central position in the economy (structural power). Increasingly, however, finance also enjoys infrastructural power, which stems from entanglements between specific…
From performativity to political economy: Index investing, ETFs and asset manager capitalism
As a discipline, political economy has often been reluctant to engage with the details of market devices and practices. This weakens the microfoundations of its analysis of capitalist macro-dynamics and cedes unnecessarily large stretches of intellectual territory to economics. The performativity approach developed by Michel Callon offers a theoretical way out of this dual dilemma. It allows political economists to study 'the economy' directly by…
Speaking to the people? Money, trust, and central bank legitimacy in the age of quantitative easing
Financial upheaval and unconventional monetary policies have made money a salient political issue. This provides a rare opportunity to study the under-appreciated role of monetary trust in the politics of central bank legitimacy which, for the first time in decades, appears fragile. While research on central bank communication with 'the markets' abounds, little is known about if and how central bankers speak to 'the people.' A closer look at the …
Rethinking agency in International Relations: Performativity, Performances and Actor-Networks
Exit, Control, and Politics: Structural Power and Corporate Governance under Asset Manager Capitalism
The power of finance vis-à-vis the nonfinancial sector is changing. Macroeconomic developments and financial innovations have reduced financial actors' exit options, thus diminishing exit-based structural power. At the same time, shareholdings have become more concentrated in the hands of large asset managers, thus increasing control-based power. This article documents these trends, before examining whether asset managers wield their power and wh…
Governing the future: The European Central Bank’s expectation management during the Great Moderation
The experience of the global financial crisis has sparked renewed interest in the role of futurity in the capitalist economy in general and in the formation and coordination of expectations under uncertainty in particular. Economic sociologists have carefully studied the 'defuturizing' technologies devised by private actors, but have tended to neglect the increasingly pivotal part played by central banks. Political economists have had more to say…
Green macrofinancial regimes
Financial globalization as positive integration: Monetary technocrats and the Eurodollar market in the 1970s
International political economy (IPE) has explained financial globalization as the result of states deciding to open up and liberalize domestic financial systems. Complementing this ‘negative integration’ view, we present a theory of financial globalization during the 1970s that emphasizes the importance of ‘positive integration.’ Credit money systems are characterized by public-private infrastructural entanglements, the management of which requi…
Preparedness, Crisis Management and Policy Change: The Euro Area at the Critical Juncture of 2008–2013
Research Highlights and Abstract This article contributes to the literature on ideational and institutional change at critical junctures more generally, and in the context of economic crises in particular. In the context of explosive economic crises critical junctures should be conceptualised as consisting of two distinct phases—a phase of emergency crisis management and a subsequent phase of purposeful institution building. The analytical signif…
Strong Firms, Weak Banks: The Financial Consequences of Germany’s Export-Led Growth Model
The financial foundation of Germany's manufacturing success, according to the comparative capitalism literature, is an ample supply of long-term capital, provided to firms by a three-pillar banking system and 'patient' domestic shareholders. This premise also informs the recent literature on growth models, which documents a shift towards a purely export-led growth model in Germany since the 1990s. We challenge this common assumption of continuity…
Fueling Financialization: The Economic Consequences of Funded Pensions
Keywords pension funds, financialization, asset manager capitalism, capital stewardship, labor's capital
Asset manager capitalism: An introduction to its political economy and economic geography
Asset manager capitalism; political economy; economic geography; finance
Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank
Monetary and financial integration has been shown to increase the pressure on states to liberalize social and labor market policies. If structures do not come with instruction sheets, how do monetary regime pressures translate into policy? Through a case study of the euro area, we show that central banks play an underappreciated role in this process. Using mixed methods to analyze a large amount of data, including the complete corpus of speeches,…
Planning laissez-faire: Supranational central banking and structural reforms
The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Although Polanyi has been a key reference point for the debate on the social consequences of Eur…
Single Female Breast Cancer Patients' Perspectives on Intimate Relationships
This qualitative study examined how female breast cancer patients without partners conceptualized their relationship status. Qualitative data were collected from 20 participants who did not have partners during diagnosis and treatment. Phenomenology informed the methodology and thematic analysis. Breast cancer patients without partners discussed how they made meaning of their relationship status within the context of their cancer experience and b…
Social support needs of breast cancer patients without partners
This qualitative study investigated how women without partners navigate social support challenges following their breast cancer diagnoses. In-depth interviews were used for collection. Twenty women without partners discussed the supportive and unsupportive roles their relatives, peers, and colleagues played during diagnoses and treatment. Family systems theory guided the construction of interview questions. Thematic analysis uncovered the followi…
Noisy Politics, Quiet Technocrats: Strategic Silence by Central Banks
In contrast to the “quiet” politics of the pre‐2008 period, macroeconomic policy has become “noisy”. This break raises a question: How do independent agencies designed for quiet politics react when a contentious public turns the volume up on them? Central banks provide an interesting case because while they are self‐professed adherents to communicative transparency, individual case studies have documented their use of strategic silence as a defen…
Relationship Constellations and Dynamics of Low-Income Rural Mothers
To address the policy debate surrounding the use of funds from TemporaryAssistance to Needy Families for marriage-promotion activities, this article profiles thenature of low-income rural mothers’ relationships with their partners and thenonresidential fathers of their children. It presents the results of interviews with 35lowincome mothers from two rural Maryland counties. Although the analyses revealedthat the presence of a male partner was not…
Welfare to Well-Being Transition
Welfare to Well-Being Transition
Relationship Constellations and Dynamics of Low-Income Rural Mothers
To address the policy debate surrounding the use of funds from TemporaryAssistance to Needy Families for marriage-promotion activities, this article profiles thenature of low-income rural mothers’ relationships with their partners and thenonresidential fathers of their children. It presents the results of interviews with 35lowincome mothers from two rural Maryland counties. Although the analyses revealedthat the presence of a male partner was not…
Special Reviewers
Teaching Family Policy: Advocacy Skills Education
Preparing students to engage in family policy education and advocacy is a challenge and opportunity for departments that teach family studies and family policy courses. Students not only need to know theoretical implications of family policy and how research enhances the theory, but also understand the policy process and how research-based information about family can inform policymaking. These students also need to acquire advocacy skills in ord…
Depression and Poverty Among Rural Women: A Relationship of Social Causation or Social Selection
Context and Purpose: Depression among rural women is a major public health concern. The purpose of this study was to test the competing theories of social causation and social selection to assess the relationship between depression and economic status for a sample of rural, low‐income women in the United States. Methods: Structural equation modeling was used to analyze data from Rural Families Speak, a US Department of Agriculture‐funded multi‐st…
Having Their Say: Rural Mothers Talk about Welfare
The public's perception of persons who rely on public assistance is generally negative. The surprising element is that mothers who are themselves reliant on welfare also hold these negative attitudes. This paper explored the attitudes toward and experiences with welfare of rural low income mothers using data from the Rural Families Speak longitudinal, multi‐state project. Consistent with prior research, the majority of rural mothers spoke dispara…
Understanding Health Insurance Literacy: A Literature Review
The 2010 Affordable Care Act changed health insurance plans for both the insured and uninsured. Currently insured consumers need to understand changes that impact their purchase decisions, and newly eligible consumers need to understand how to purchase through the new health insurance marketplace. Health insurance literacy is a new concept that addresses the extent to which consumers can make informed purchase and use decisions. Consumers current…
Preparedness, Crisis Management and Policy Change: The Euro Area at the Critical Juncture of 2008–2013
Research Highlights and Abstract This article contributes to the literature on ideational and institutional change at critical junctures more generally, and in the context of economic crises in particular. In the context of explosive economic crises critical junctures should be conceptualised as consisting of two distinct phases—a phase of emergency crisis management and a subsequent phase of purposeful institution building. The analytical signif…
From performativity to political economy: Index investing, ETFs and asset manager capitalism
As a discipline, political economy has often been reluctant to engage with the details of market devices and practices. This weakens the microfoundations of its analysis of capitalist macro-dynamics and cedes unnecessarily large stretches of intellectual territory to economics. The performativity approach developed by Michel Callon offers a theoretical way out of this dual dilemma. It allows political economists to study 'the economy' directly by…
Governing the future: The European Central Bank’s expectation management during the Great Moderation
The experience of the global financial crisis has sparked renewed interest in the role of futurity in the capitalist economy in general and in the formation and coordination of expectations under uncertainty in particular. Economic sociologists have carefully studied the 'defuturizing' technologies devised by private actors, but have tended to neglect the increasingly pivotal part played by central banks. Political economists have had more to say…
Assessing health literacy and oral health: Preliminary results of a multi‐site investigation
Our analysis showed that dental school patients exhibit a range of health literacy abilities. It also revealed that the relationship between health literacy and oral health is not straightforward, depending on patient characteristics and the unique circumstances of the encounter. We anticipate future analyses of MOHLRS data will answer questions about the role that health literacy and various mediating factors play in explaining oral health dispa…
Speaking to the people? Money, trust, and central bank legitimacy in the age of quantitative easing
Financial upheaval and unconventional monetary policies have made money a salient political issue. This provides a rare opportunity to study the under-appreciated role of monetary trust in the politics of central bank legitimacy which, for the first time in decades, appears fragile. While research on central bank communication with 'the markets' abounds, little is known about if and how central bankers speak to 'the people.' A closer look at the …
Single Female Breast Cancer Patients' Perspectives on Intimate Relationships
This qualitative study examined how female breast cancer patients without partners conceptualized their relationship status. Qualitative data were collected from 20 participants who did not have partners during diagnosis and treatment. Phenomenology informed the methodology and thematic analysis. Breast cancer patients without partners discussed how they made meaning of their relationship status within the context of their cancer experience and b…
Governing through financial markets: Towards a critical political economy of Capital Markets Union
Capital Markets Union is a large-scale political project to strengthen and further integrate European market-based finance. An initiative of the European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker’s leadership, Capital Markets Union seeks to realize a long-standing goal of European policy makers: a financial system in which capital markets will absorb more of citizens’ savings and play a greater role in corporate finance. Market-based banking, too, is …
Rethinking agency in International Relations: Performativity, Performances and Actor-Networks
Loneliness and Social Isolation—A Private Problem, A Public Issue
Social support needs of breast cancer patients without partners
This qualitative study investigated how women without partners navigate social support challenges following their breast cancer diagnoses. In-depth interviews were used for collection. Twenty women without partners discussed the supportive and unsupportive roles their relatives, peers, and colleagues played during diagnoses and treatment. Family systems theory guided the construction of interview questions. Thematic analysis uncovered the followi…
Financial globalization as positive integration: Monetary technocrats and the Eurodollar market in the 1970s
International political economy (IPE) has explained financial globalization as the result of states deciding to open up and liberalize domestic financial systems. Complementing this ‘negative integration’ view, we present a theory of financial globalization during the 1970s that emphasizes the importance of ‘positive integration.’ Credit money systems are characterized by public-private infrastructural entanglements, the management of which requi…
Strong Firms, Weak Banks: The Financial Consequences of Germany’s Export-Led Growth Model
The financial foundation of Germany's manufacturing success, according to the comparative capitalism literature, is an ample supply of long-term capital, provided to firms by a three-pillar banking system and 'patient' domestic shareholders. This premise also informs the recent literature on growth models, which documents a shift towards a purely export-led growth model in Germany since the 1990s. We challenge this common assumption of continuity…
Central banking and the infrastructural power of finance: The case of ECB support for repo and securitization markets
The pre-crisis rise and post-crisis resilience of European repo and securitization markets represent political victories for the interests of large banks. To explain when and how finance wins, the literature emphasizes lobbying capacity (instrumental power) and the financial sector's central position in the economy (structural power). Increasingly, however, finance also enjoys infrastructural power, which stems from entanglements between specific…
Asset Manager Capitalism as a Corporate Governance Regime
For too long, students of the political economy of corporate governance have been enthralled by the language of ownership and control. This language stems from Berle and Means (1932), who observed that trust-busting policies and the diversification of robber-baron fortunes had dispersed stock ownership in the United States, while concentrating corporate control in the hands of a small class of managers. 1 Jensen and Meckling’s (1976) agency theor…
Planning laissez-faire: Supranational central banking and structural reforms
The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Although Polanyi has been a key reference point for the debate on the social consequences of Eur…
Fueling Financialization: The Economic Consequences of Funded Pensions
Keywords pension funds, financialization, asset manager capitalism, capital stewardship, labor's capital
Exit, Control, and Politics: Structural Power and Corporate Governance under Asset Manager Capitalism
The power of finance vis-à-vis the nonfinancial sector is changing. Macroeconomic developments and financial innovations have reduced financial actors' exit options, thus diminishing exit-based structural power. At the same time, shareholdings have become more concentrated in the hands of large asset managers, thus increasing control-based power. This article documents these trends, before examining whether asset managers wield their power and wh…
Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank
Monetary and financial integration has been shown to increase the pressure on states to liberalize social and labor market policies. If structures do not come with instruction sheets, how do monetary regime pressures translate into policy? Through a case study of the euro area, we show that central banks play an underappreciated role in this process. Using mixed methods to analyze a large amount of data, including the complete corpus of speeches,…
Economics (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Market economy (7 works)