Tiago Cardao-Pito

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that financial economics must be understood as management thought. Key financial economic theories advocate a specific view of management and organizations, namely the maximization of shareholder value (wealth). This study’s methodology is a narrative history of three financial economic theories and their connection to the organizational purpose of maximizing shareholder value. The three theories are Fisher’s capital-income theory, Ronald Coase’s view of firms underlying transaction cost economics, and agency theory. These three financial theories build the same theory, namely Fisher’s capital-income theory. This theory claims that future monetary flows (wealth) paid to shareholders discounted by a compound rate can explain markets, firms’ prices, and even capitalism. Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller relaunched this theory. Coase’s view of firms addresses a difficulty in capital-income theory: if markets are perfect, why is there a need for firms to partially organize production outside the market system? Coase’s answer is because of the costs of using the market price mechanism in the allocation of resources, which reduce the forecasts of future economic benefits. Otherwise, the market would be applied to allocate resources. This view was later developed into transaction cost economics by Oliver Williamson and other scholars. The agency theory from Michael Jensen and William Meckling is just an application of capital-income theory, where firms exist to increase shareholders’ wealth, and managers should receive large salaries and bonuses to ensure this. Agency costs are a type of transaction cost economics that explains the existence of firms. Future research can explore the relevance of financial economic theories for management thought and practice. This study was developed exclusively from document (archival) evidence. A better understanding of this source of management thought may be helpful for developing new management theories. This study demonstrates that financial economic theories contain important elements of management thought, although they are often classified as unrelated to management theory. It provides a narrative history of financial economic theories related to shareholder value constructs.

Political economy has two major concepts of capital. In one, capital is defined as money. Adam Smith proposed the other, which considers capital as anything that has a role in the creation of wealth even if peripheral. It includes, for instance, machines, the biosphere (“nature capital” or “natural capital”), and even human beings (“human capital”). The concept of capitalism is generally derived from Smith's overinclusive concept of capital. This led to ambiguity and tautology. However, the pre-Smith concept of capital does not require the concept of capitalism. By removing non-monetary elements from the concept of capital, this study reaches an alternative ‘monetary society in the biosphere’ concept, which avoids confusion regarding monetary and non-monetary flows. This new concept integrates the economic and societal production in the biosphere. Furthermore, it recognizes that various monetary flows can be detrimental to ecological crises. Abandoning the concept of capitalism can contribute to conceptual precision in addressing the political economy of societal, environmental, and green development phenomena.

The current economic and societal production system gives money a magnified importance, overlooking other essential flows necessary for human survival and existence. It focuses on monetary indicators like profits, dividends, and GDPs to evaluate organizational production, while often disregarding outputs that harm the biosphere. Money is treated as the constitutive being (ousia) and attributed undemonstrated explanatory properties. Intangible flow theory helps eliminate this metaphysical status of money by recognizing that monetary flows are just one of many necessary flows for human survival and existence. Organizations deliver product-flows that require input-flows from and send output-flows back to the encompassing biosphere, whether they explicitly engage in environmentally friendly activities or not. Therefore, every organization is an ecological entity because it has a relationship with the biosphere, which participates in the manner through which humans integrate into their surrounding environment and relate to other living beings. Eliminating the metaphysical status of money integrates every organization in the biosphere, making organizations accountable for environmental harm caused by their activities. This can be achieved by deconstructing the metaphysical status of money in business models.

Purpose: Illicit financial flows are targeted by the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, these illicit flows are not entirely understood. Furthermore, they can benefit from economic norms, laws, and regulations that lack mechanisms to detect and penalize them. This paper investigates whether a recent test, the embezzler test, can be used to identify regulatory architectures that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. Design/methodology/approach: To develop a more advanced version of the embezzler test in terms of definitions and practical implementation methodology. Findings: In this test, the definition of embezzlement can be understood to be the occurrence of illicit financial flows crossing the boundaries of organizations and/or countries. This is a multi-stage test, which intentionally simulates illicit financial flows to observe how well equipped is the regulatory architecture to deal with other financial offences that are related with these flows, such as theft, money laundering, fraud, corruption, market manipulation, and tax evasion. Originality: This is the first explicit test that has been presented to identify norms, laws, and regulations that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. Research implications: Future research can employ the version of this test to stress test a large range of economic norms, laws, and regulations. Practical/Social implications: This test’s new version can assist achieve the UN SDGs’ illicit financial flow reduction target. Furthermore, it can be used to study both existing and proposed norms, laws, and regulation.

The dominant economic explanations of the 20th century are not comprehensive enough to describe the complexity of economy and society and their reliance on the biosphere. Intangible Flow Theory in Economics: Human Participation in Economic and Societal Production outlines a new theory that challenges both economics and the relativism conveyed in social constructivism, poststructuralism and postmodernism. To mainstream economics and Marxism, monetary flows transform us humans into commodities. To this new theory, flows of economic elements as physical goods or money are consummated by intangible flows that cannot yet be precisely appraised at an actual or approximate value, for instance, workflows, service flows, information flows or communicational flows. The theory suggests a systematic alternative to refute the human commodity framework and interrelated conjectures (e.g. human capital, human resources, human assets). Furthermore, it exhibits that economic and societal production is fully integrated on the biosphere. Conversely, contemporary relativism argues for the end of theory development, suspension of evidence and entrenchment of knowledge validity among local systems (named as paradigms, epistemes, research programs, truth regimes or other terms). Thus, relativism tacitly supports dominant theories as the human commodity framework because it preventively sabotages the creation of new theoretical explanations. Disputing relativist theses, intangible flow theory demonstrates that innovative theoretical explanations remain possible. This book is of significant interest to students and scholars of political economy, economic sociology, organization, economics and social theory.

Contemporary mainstream economics cannot be seen as disconnected from philosophical concerns. On the contrary, it should be understood as a defence for a specific philosophy, namely, crude quantitative hedonism where money would measure pleasure and pain. Disguised among a great mathematical apparatus involving utility functions, supply, and demand, lies a specific hedonist philosophy that every year is lectured to thousands of economic and business students around the world. This hedonist philosophy is much less sophisticated than that in ancient hedonist philosophers as Epicurus or Lucretius. Furthermore, it does not solve any of the systematic difficulties regularly faced by hedonist philosophy. However, the argument that economics is detached from philosophy works as a rhetorical artifice to protect its dominant underlying philosophy: Philosophical disputes would have to be addressed within the biased mathematical apparatus of quantitative hedonism. Economists and business students must learn to identify the underlying philosophy in mainstream economics and alternative philosophical systems.