Matthew Soener
Biographic Data
| ID | 273318 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Soener |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Soener |
| SIGNATURE | SOENER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9261-9622 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The wages of investor power: Shareholder exploitation in Europe
Exploitation, or the ability of property owners to gain at worker’s expense, is a classic sociological explanation for inequality. However, it is a difficult process to identify and empirically show with most data sources. Using data on European corporations from 1995 to 2020, we ask if shareholder gains come at the expense of employee earnings in a process we call “shareholder exploitation.” Panel estimation results confirm a robust antagonistic…
Secular stagnation and climate change
Antiblack Discrimination in Public Accommodations: Differential Drink Pricing in Urban Nightclubs
Studies have demonstrated evidence of racial discrimination in public accommodations. Within urban nightclubs specifically, blacks experience racial discrimination when attempting to gain access, yet little is known about the treatment they receive once inside. To assess whether there is racial discrimination inside urban nightclubs, the authors sent black and white men testers to 30 nightclubs in Chicago to determine whether black men paid more …
Organizational Intersectionality: Do Gender and Migration Status Inequalities Reinforce or Offset Each Other in French Workplaces
This study examines whether organizations with significant pay gaps along one dimension (gender, migration status, class, etc.) tend to exhibit similarly high inequalities along other dimensions, or whether there is a trade-off between inequality dimensions. Using French administrative data, it estimates correlations between class, gender and migrant workplace earnings gaps, and studies how these gaps also relate to a fourth measure of intra-cate…
Decarbonization and the Capitalist State
Decarbonization is the most important challenge of our time. Though quite modest, states are taking more climate action. How should we approach these efforts? Sociologists have paid less attention to decarbonization overall but frameworks in political sociology can make sense of state power and climate politics. In this review, I first discuss two sets of literature. The first extends “state‐capacity” and institutionalist frameworks. The second i…
Are IMF programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South
Are International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South? I argue powerful actors structure markets in ways exacerbating climate change. This works through the IMF's imposition of market coercion-specifically, currency devaluation, global openness and fiscal pressures from austerity. Countries respond to these conditions through extractivist strategies and productive growth to increase exports. To invest…
The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
Who Benefits from Migrant and Female Labor? Connecting Wages to Demographic Changes in French Workplaces 1
We ask how an increasing share of women or migrants in the workplace affects wages for different groups depending on market‐based or relational outcomes. Using data on nearly every French employee and workplace, we propose four theoretically informed outcomes. We do not find an increase in the share of women or migrants provokes a wage backlash but that these groups instead have some “power in numbers.” Yet, most importantly, our results show dem…
Financialization goes South: Foreign capital flows and financial accumulation in emerging markets
Has global financial integration allowed firms in the so-called “Global South” to profit from financial activity? Financialization researchers have either neglected these countries and the international economic order in general or neglected firm-level dynamics, a broad sample of emerging markets, and a theoretical and historical explanation for this trend. I attempt to fill these gaps using data on all non-financial corporations across 31 emergi…
Author Correction: Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Ups and downs in finance, ups without downs in inequality
The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer-employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 …
Class Power in Hard Times: Excavating Nicos Poulantzas’s Theory of the Capitalist State through the History of the 2007–2008 Crisis
After the 2007–8 financial crisis, the fortunes of the American financial class remained surprisingly secure. This owed to the state’s extraordinary set of bailout measures. How do we theoretically make sense of the state’s class bias? Most prevailing state theories are agnostic to class. This is a sharp departure from their neo-Marxist predecessors, particularly Nicos Poulantzas, who argued that capitalist states support the dominant class facti…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Did the ‘Real’ Economy Turn Financial? Mapping the Contours of Financialisation in the Non-Financial Corporate Sector
The ‘financialisation’ of the economy is considered a key phenomenon of our time, but we lack large-scale empirical evidence of it. Has financialisation in the non-financial corporate sector really taken off in recent decades? To answer this question, I marshal data on all available publicly traded corporations in the largest 37 countries from 1991 to 2017. While there has been a decline in ‘real’ capital accumulation, I do not find firms are sub…
Power at a distance: Organizational power across boundaries
Organizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizati…
Profiting in a Warming World: Investigating the Link Between Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Capitalist Profitability in OECD States
Economic growth is a key contributor to climate change, but undergirding growth is capitalist profitability. In this article, I refine this long‐standing relationship between growth and emissions by estimating if the profit rate and the “exploitation rate” (surplus profits / wages and salaries) predict greenhouse gas emissions. I do so in a sample of advanced capitalist economies from 1995 to 2016 with profitability data on four industries (agric…
Income precarity and the financial crisis
American families have become less economically secure in recent decades, and this process accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. This study investigates how the crisis apportioned income precarity among families compared to pre-crisis years. We use the Survey of Consumer Finances and find that working families suffered the preponderance of income losses from the crisis, although the crisis shifted income losses…
Citadels of privilege: The rise of LLCs, LPs and the perpetuation of elite power in America
Corporations are typically identified as the primary organization for producing and redistributing resources. They continue to be important but are not alone. Since the early 1990s, there has been a substantial rise in the number of limited liability companies (LLCs) and limited partnerships (LPs) in the United States. These flexible legal-organizational forms combine the benefits of traditional corporations but with less public accountability an…
Why do firms financialize? Meso-level evidence from the US apparel and footwear industry, 1991-2005
In recent decades, financialization has significantly restructured American capitalism. Social scientists have offered several accounts to explain financial markets' ascendance, but this work often portrays financialization as a totalizing force and is conducted within divergent theoretical paradigms—political economy and neo-institutionalism—with few attempts to bridge these differences. Accordingly, we risk talking past each other while failing…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Citadels of privilege: The rise of LLCs, LPs and the perpetuation of elite power in America
Corporations are typically identified as the primary organization for producing and redistributing resources. They continue to be important but are not alone. Since the early 1990s, there has been a substantial rise in the number of limited liability companies (LLCs) and limited partnerships (LPs) in the United States. These flexible legal-organizational forms combine the benefits of traditional corporations but with less public accountability an…
Why do firms financialize? Meso-level evidence from the US apparel and footwear industry, 1991-2005
In recent decades, financialization has significantly restructured American capitalism. Social scientists have offered several accounts to explain financial markets' ascendance, but this work often portrays financialization as a totalizing force and is conducted within divergent theoretical paradigms—political economy and neo-institutionalism—with few attempts to bridge these differences. Accordingly, we risk talking past each other while failing…
Did the ‘Real’ Economy Turn Financial? Mapping the Contours of Financialisation in the Non-Financial Corporate Sector
The ‘financialisation’ of the economy is considered a key phenomenon of our time, but we lack large-scale empirical evidence of it. Has financialisation in the non-financial corporate sector really taken off in recent decades? To answer this question, I marshal data on all available publicly traded corporations in the largest 37 countries from 1991 to 2017. While there has been a decline in ‘real’ capital accumulation, I do not find firms are sub…
Income precarity and the financial crisis
American families have become less economically secure in recent decades, and this process accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. This study investigates how the crisis apportioned income precarity among families compared to pre-crisis years. We use the Survey of Consumer Finances and find that working families suffered the preponderance of income losses from the crisis, although the crisis shifted income losses…
Profiting in a Warming World: Investigating the Link Between Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Capitalist Profitability in OECD States
Economic growth is a key contributor to climate change, but undergirding growth is capitalist profitability. In this article, I refine this long‐standing relationship between growth and emissions by estimating if the profit rate and the “exploitation rate” (surplus profits / wages and salaries) predict greenhouse gas emissions. I do so in a sample of advanced capitalist economies from 1995 to 2016 with profitability data on four industries (agric…
Power at a distance: Organizational power across boundaries
Organizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizati…
The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
Financialization goes South: Foreign capital flows and financial accumulation in emerging markets
Has global financial integration allowed firms in the so-called “Global South” to profit from financial activity? Financialization researchers have either neglected these countries and the international economic order in general or neglected firm-level dynamics, a broad sample of emerging markets, and a theoretical and historical explanation for this trend. I attempt to fill these gaps using data on all non-financial corporations across 31 emergi…
Ups and downs in finance, ups without downs in inequality
The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer-employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 …
Secular stagnation and climate change
Antiblack Discrimination in Public Accommodations: Differential Drink Pricing in Urban Nightclubs
Studies have demonstrated evidence of racial discrimination in public accommodations. Within urban nightclubs specifically, blacks experience racial discrimination when attempting to gain access, yet little is known about the treatment they receive once inside. To assess whether there is racial discrimination inside urban nightclubs, the authors sent black and white men testers to 30 nightclubs in Chicago to determine whether black men paid more …
Organizational Intersectionality: Do Gender and Migration Status Inequalities Reinforce or Offset Each Other in French Workplaces
This study examines whether organizations with significant pay gaps along one dimension (gender, migration status, class, etc.) tend to exhibit similarly high inequalities along other dimensions, or whether there is a trade-off between inequality dimensions. Using French administrative data, it estimates correlations between class, gender and migrant workplace earnings gaps, and studies how these gaps also relate to a fourth measure of intra-cate…
Decarbonization and the Capitalist State
Decarbonization is the most important challenge of our time. Though quite modest, states are taking more climate action. How should we approach these efforts? Sociologists have paid less attention to decarbonization overall but frameworks in political sociology can make sense of state power and climate politics. In this review, I first discuss two sets of literature. The first extends “state‐capacity” and institutionalist frameworks. The second i…
Are IMF programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South
Are International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South? I argue powerful actors structure markets in ways exacerbating climate change. This works through the IMF's imposition of market coercion-specifically, currency devaluation, global openness and fiscal pressures from austerity. Countries respond to these conditions through extractivist strategies and productive growth to increase exports. To invest…
Who Benefits from Migrant and Female Labor? Connecting Wages to Demographic Changes in French Workplaces 1
We ask how an increasing share of women or migrants in the workplace affects wages for different groups depending on market‐based or relational outcomes. Using data on nearly every French employee and workplace, we propose four theoretically informed outcomes. We do not find an increase in the share of women or migrants provokes a wage backlash but that these groups instead have some “power in numbers.” Yet, most importantly, our results show dem…
Author Correction: Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Why do firms financialize? Meso-level evidence from the US apparel and footwear industry, 1991-2005
In recent decades, financialization has significantly restructured American capitalism. Social scientists have offered several accounts to explain financial markets' ascendance, but this work often portrays financialization as a totalizing force and is conducted within divergent theoretical paradigms—political economy and neo-institutionalism—with few attempts to bridge these differences. Accordingly, we risk talking past each other while failing…
Power at a distance: Organizational power across boundaries
Organizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizati…
Profiting in a Warming World: Investigating the Link Between Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Capitalist Profitability in OECD States
Economic growth is a key contributor to climate change, but undergirding growth is capitalist profitability. In this article, I refine this long‐standing relationship between growth and emissions by estimating if the profit rate and the “exploitation rate” (surplus profits / wages and salaries) predict greenhouse gas emissions. I do so in a sample of advanced capitalist economies from 1995 to 2016 with profitability data on four industries (agric…
Income precarity and the financial crisis
American families have become less economically secure in recent decades, and this process accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. This study investigates how the crisis apportioned income precarity among families compared to pre-crisis years. We use the Survey of Consumer Finances and find that working families suffered the preponderance of income losses from the crisis, although the crisis shifted income losses…
Citadels of privilege: The rise of LLCs, LPs and the perpetuation of elite power in America
Corporations are typically identified as the primary organization for producing and redistributing resources. They continue to be important but are not alone. Since the early 1990s, there has been a substantial rise in the number of limited liability companies (LLCs) and limited partnerships (LPs) in the United States. These flexible legal-organizational forms combine the benefits of traditional corporations but with less public accountability an…
Did the ‘Real’ Economy Turn Financial? Mapping the Contours of Financialisation in the Non-Financial Corporate Sector
The ‘financialisation’ of the economy is considered a key phenomenon of our time, but we lack large-scale empirical evidence of it. Has financialisation in the non-financial corporate sector really taken off in recent decades? To answer this question, I marshal data on all available publicly traded corporations in the largest 37 countries from 1991 to 2017. While there has been a decline in ‘real’ capital accumulation, I do not find firms are sub…
Class Power in Hard Times: Excavating Nicos Poulantzas’s Theory of the Capitalist State through the History of the 2007–2008 Crisis
After the 2007–8 financial crisis, the fortunes of the American financial class remained surprisingly secure. This owed to the state’s extraordinary set of bailout measures. How do we theoretically make sense of the state’s class bias? Most prevailing state theories are agnostic to class. This is a sharp departure from their neo-Marxist predecessors, particularly Nicos Poulantzas, who argued that capitalist states support the dominant class facti…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Who Benefits from Migrant and Female Labor? Connecting Wages to Demographic Changes in French Workplaces 1
We ask how an increasing share of women or migrants in the workplace affects wages for different groups depending on market‐based or relational outcomes. Using data on nearly every French employee and workplace, we propose four theoretically informed outcomes. We do not find an increase in the share of women or migrants provokes a wage backlash but that these groups instead have some “power in numbers.” Yet, most importantly, our results show dem…
Financialization goes South: Foreign capital flows and financial accumulation in emerging markets
Has global financial integration allowed firms in the so-called “Global South” to profit from financial activity? Financialization researchers have either neglected these countries and the international economic order in general or neglected firm-level dynamics, a broad sample of emerging markets, and a theoretical and historical explanation for this trend. I attempt to fill these gaps using data on all non-financial corporations across 31 emergi…
Author Correction: Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Ups and downs in finance, ups without downs in inequality
The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer-employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 …
Decarbonization and the Capitalist State
Decarbonization is the most important challenge of our time. Though quite modest, states are taking more climate action. How should we approach these efforts? Sociologists have paid less attention to decarbonization overall but frameworks in political sociology can make sense of state power and climate politics. In this review, I first discuss two sets of literature. The first extends “state‐capacity” and institutionalist frameworks. The second i…
Are IMF programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South
Are International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs raising greenhouse gas emissions in the Global South? I argue powerful actors structure markets in ways exacerbating climate change. This works through the IMF's imposition of market coercion-specifically, currency devaluation, global openness and fiscal pressures from austerity. Countries respond to these conditions through extractivist strategies and productive growth to increase exports. To invest…
The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
The wages of investor power: Shareholder exploitation in Europe
Exploitation, or the ability of property owners to gain at worker’s expense, is a classic sociological explanation for inequality. However, it is a difficult process to identify and empirically show with most data sources. Using data on European corporations from 1995 to 2020, we ask if shareholder gains come at the expense of employee earnings in a process we call “shareholder exploitation.” Panel estimation results confirm a robust antagonistic…
Secular stagnation and climate change
Antiblack Discrimination in Public Accommodations: Differential Drink Pricing in Urban Nightclubs
Studies have demonstrated evidence of racial discrimination in public accommodations. Within urban nightclubs specifically, blacks experience racial discrimination when attempting to gain access, yet little is known about the treatment they receive once inside. To assess whether there is racial discrimination inside urban nightclubs, the authors sent black and white men testers to 30 nightclubs in Chicago to determine whether black men paid more …
Organizational Intersectionality: Do Gender and Migration Status Inequalities Reinforce or Offset Each Other in French Workplaces
This study examines whether organizations with significant pay gaps along one dimension (gender, migration status, class, etc.) tend to exhibit similarly high inequalities along other dimensions, or whether there is a trade-off between inequality dimensions. Using French administrative data, it estimates correlations between class, gender and migrant workplace earnings gaps, and studies how these gaps also relate to a fourth measure of intra-cate…
Economics (15 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (10 works) · Political science (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Business (5 works) · Finance (5 works) · Labour economics (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Inequality (4 works)