This paper examines the European Union's strategy of governing the economy through financial markets by focusing on the largely unacknowledged role of public development banks, including the multilateral European Investment Bank. It argues that these state-owned financial institutions have moved into a key position in the recent evolution of the European financial system and economic governance. Since the crisis, policy makers have used them to address the intrinsic volatility and excess liquidity of contemporary financial markets, as well as offset the constraints on public investment imposed by institutionalized fiscal austerity. The paper provides evidence for this claim through an analysis of the emergent policy nexus between the Investment Plan for Europe and the Action Plan on Building a Capital Markets Union. Based on official documents and interview data, it specifically traces the risk-sharing devices for small-and medium-sized enterprise and infrastructure finance set up by development banks within these initiatives. Equipped with public guarantees, they have been instrumental for the promotion of securitization markets and publicprivate partnerships through increased multilevel collaborations among development banks. The anchor role of such quasi-fiscal state actors in shaping capital markets, the paper concludes, has profound political implications, and therefore warrants further scholarly attention.

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Over the past decade, the study of emerging markets has become one of the most vibrant fields of Comparative Capitalism (CC) scholarship. CC studies have not only mapped a range of different emerging market capitalisms but have also identified both functional and dysfunctional types that further differ based on their integration into the global economy. The article reviews the evolution of these ideal-typological efforts, ranging from the notion of dependent market economies in Central Eastern Europe to hierarchical market economies prevalent mostly in Latin America, from patrimonial capitalism (such as in Russia) to statepermeated capitalism (based on the study of China and India). While the CC study of emerging markets has also addressed some of the criticisms posed against the earlier Varieties of Capitalism-framework, it still faces significant analytical and methodological challenges. Against this background, the article proposes to incorporate the Growth Model approach into the CC framework and probes its usefulness for the analysis of emerging market capitalisms.

Financialization has become the go-to term for scholarship that studies the vastly expanded role of finance in contemporary politics, economy and society. The growth of financialization studies reflects the evident need for an analytical vocabulary that can capture these key empirical developments in contemporary capitalism. Since the 1990s, a variety of divergent conceptualizations of financialization have been offered, allowing financialization studies to prosper in a transdisciplinary way. Tracing the evolution of the field's broad themes and reviewing its key definitions, we articulate what unites the diverse financialization scholarship and touch upon recent debates regarding the concept's continued value. We suggest that three principles may guide conceptualizations of financialization going forward: being limited, mechanism-oriented, and contextual. Finally, we introduce and review the contributions to six parts of the Handbook of Financialization and conclude with a brief outlook for the field.

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