CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING AND FINANCIALIZATION OF NON-FINANCIAL CORPORATIONS: EVIDENCE FROM SPAIN

Organizational changes carried out by firms over the past decades have often involved the segmentation of the corporation into a portfolio of multiple subsidiaries and the consequent proliferation of financial assets of group-related firms. Looking at a sample of large non-financial corporations (NFCS) in Spain, we show that these changes can be related to a greater exposure of nfcs to financial markets, stronger shareholder-value oriented performance metrics and a more active management of corporate assets. Thus, this growing segmentation of the corporation reflects an expansion of the financial view of the firm as another important aspect of the financialization of nfcs, complementary to the extensively documented downsizing processes often studied in the literature on financialization.