Research

This stream of my research examines the co-evolution of financial infrastructure, public debt, banking systems, and state capacity in late-developing contexts. I ask how states mobilize financial instruments to expand resources and govern risks before fiscal, regulatory, and market institutions are fully consolidated. These efforts often emerge from urgent state projects, from fiscal-military pressures in modern state formation to developmental goals and governance in the post-reform economy. Across these cases, financial infrastructures do not simply reflect pre-existing state–market relations. They help define the terms through which states and market actors interact, while also being reshaped through those interactions. This produces patterns of development that distinguish late-developing financial systems from the more sequenced trajectories often associated with Western capitalism.

This line of research examines financialization as an organizational process in the digital economy. I study how financial capital becomes directly involved in building sectors, scaling firms, and reorganizing platform operations. Across these projects, I trace how financialization operates across the life cycle of the platform economy, from venture-capital-backed expansion and market-making to maturity, public-market valuation, and governance embeddedness. Together, these projects show how financialization in the new economy operates not only through the extraction of value but also by penetrating the sector’s operational logic.

Has China become more financialized or de-financialized over the past decade? This line of research addresses this question by situating recent financial reform within China’s changing growth model and the transformation of its real economy. While policymakers have curbed speculative finance and shadow banking, they have also promoted developmental finance in technology, industrial upgrading, and green transition. I address this hybridity through three related processes: changing patterns of assetization around emerging industries, the restructuring of de-risking arrangements, and policy paradigms that distinguish “good” finance from “bad” finance. Together, they analyze how financial forms are selectively combined in a state-capitalist financial system that seeks to mobilize capital for new sectors while containing the destabilizing consequences of earlier financial expansion.