Finansallasma Sorunsali ve IMKB Ornegi

Financial markets in the world, especially for the last three decades, have been evolving significantly in terms of market volumes, operational intensity, institutional and regulations as well as the authorities governing them. As financial centers, traditionally crucial for providing world liquidity, has become increasingly global, the local financial markets inevitably had to be integrated with each other. The increase in operational volumes and the changing nature of financial markets, creations of new financial products; led to the increase of the importance of financial capital and how it affected day to day life directly became one of the most important theoretical problems. Thus, the transformation witnessed in the financial markets led to a new era, dubbed as “financialization”. This study is done to fill a gap in the literature by observing historical roots of theoretical fundamentals of financialization. Here it is defined as the latest stage of capitalism particularly by focusing on the financial transformation that occured in the financial markets. Since existing literature on this topic is limited in scope and breadth the present study develops primarily a qualitative explanation of change in monetary and capital markets and then uses quantitative techniques to measure financialization in Turkey. In this thesis, the financialization of companies listed in the Istanbul Stock Exchange’s Industrial Index are analyzed using an econometric technique known as Generalized Method of Moments. The quantitative analysis has used two distinct methods to measure the relationship between firms’ investments and their debts, financial profits, sales and financial payments, variables that constitute variables for measuring financialization. The results of quantitative analyses indicates that financialization, in the form of company indebtedness, might provide positive value added to the amount of investments, particularly in the manufacturing sectors. On the other hand, both models revealed a negative relationship between higher financial benefits and amount of investments. In this case, the thesis highlights and claims that the returns on financial investments might have a decreasing influence on motivation of real investment.