Processes of Commensuration in Financial Markets

该项目的出发点是这样一种假设，即金融市场的日益活跃和自主化是一个漫长的通缩过程的产物，在这个过程中，越来越多的不同种类的金融资产和金融工具相互比较、相互替代和相互估值，从而凝聚成一个高度相互联系的金融体系。这篇论文是由申请者在2019年的一篇文章中提出的，并在这里进行了进一步的检验。在金融市场自古以来的长期历史发展和1970年代以来发生的较新的变革中，都可以看到通缩程度不断提高的轨迹，其中包括：(A)衍生品市场的兴起；(B)资本市场相对于银行中介资本流动的兴起。衍生品市场的兴起是由布莱克-斯科尔斯-默顿期权定价理论建立的基本证券(如股票、债券)和衍生品(如期权、期货)的通约化引发的。资本市场的兴起植根于银行产品(如贷款、存款)和非银行产品(资本市场证券)的相称--因此，竞争和替代。该项目通过对来自以下几个领域的金融理论家和金融从业者进行详尽的访谈，进一步收集了这两个部分发展的证据：(A)银行或其他金融公司中专门研究衍生品的金融经济学家和衍生品专家，(B)公司、咨询公司和行业期刊中的金融历史学家和公司财务专家。此外，关于问题(B)，将对选定的重要行业期刊(关于投资、公司融资)进行内容分析，以确定不同投资和融资工具之间历史上不断变化的可比性范围。布景刻意宽泛，更多地着眼于范围而不是深度。面谈的目的并不是重建任何被命名的专门领域的细节(这显然是不可能的)，而是用解释性的相称方案--增加可比性、不同工具之间比较的范围和技术手段--与外地专家进行谈话，并记录他们的反应。这将使我们能够完善我们对金融市场历史发展过程中工作过程的理论理解；该项目的目标和雄心是测试一个概念，该概念提供了过去半个世纪这种发展的全面图景。

The project sets out from the assumption that the increasing dynamism and autonomization of financial markets is the product of a long process of commensuration, by which ever more heterogeneous financial assets and financial instruments have come to be compared with, substituted for, and valuated relatively to one another, and have thereby been condensed into a highly interconnected financial system. This thesis was put forward in a 2019 article by the applicant and is put to further test here. Trajectories of increasing commensuration can be found both in the long-term historical development of financial markets from ancient origins and in the more recent transformations that have occurred since the 1970s, including (a) the rise of derivatives markets, and (b) the rise of capital markets as against bank-intermediated capital flows. The rise of derivatives markets was triggered by the commensuration of basic securities (such as stock, bond) and derivatives (such as options, futures), established by the Black-Scholes-Merton theory of option pricing. The rise of capital markets was rooted in the commensuration—and hence, competition and substitution—of bank products (such as loans, deposits) and non-bank products (capital market securities). The project collects further evidence on both partial developments by conducting discursive interviews with financial theorists and financial practicioners from several fields: (a) financial economists specialized in derivatives and derivative experts in banks or other financial firms, (b) financial historians and corporate finance experts in firms, consultancies, and industry journals. Additionally, for question (b), content analysis of selected volumes of important industry journals (on investment, corporate finance) will be done to establish historically changing ranges of comparability among different tools of investment and financing. The setting is deliberately broad and geared more to scope than to depth. The interviews do not aim at reconstructing the details of any of the named fields of expertise (which obviously would be impossible) but at discursively confronting field experts with the interpretative scheme of commensuration – as an increase in comparability, in the range and technical instrumentation of comparisons among different instruments – and at recording their reactions. This will allow us to refine our theoretical understanding of the processes at work in the historical development of financial markets; the aim and ambition of the project is to test a concept that offers a comprehensive picture of this development over the past half century.