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1. Landscapes of Rizq: Islam, Masculinity, and Speculative Real Estate in Lahore

   Rahman, Tariq (January 2021, Society for Economic Anthropology Annual Meeting)

   Landscapes of Rizq: Islam, Masculinity, and Speculative Real Estate in Lahore The city of Lahore, Pakistan has expanded by 20% in the past 20 years alone. Lahore’s exponential growth is fueled by a financialized real estate market that facilitates speculative trading of plots of land rather than constructed buildings. At the city’s ever-expanding periphery, real estate developers armed with drones and legal teams scout for cheap land while agricultural landowners collaborate to resist these efforts by refusing to sell or inflating prices. In WhatsApp groups, local and overseas Pakistani investors carefully monitor these events by sharing rumors, leaked documents, Google satellite images, and personal photos and videos in order to make their own assessments about the value of land. In the struggle to keep, buy, and sell land, several different approaches to placemaking collide—land as generational wealth; land as expansion of the modern city; land as entry to the middle class; and land as return to the homeland. Meanwhile, the financialization of land has taken a devastating toll on urban development, leading to the displacement of tenant farmers, unprecedented deforestation, and Lahore becoming the second most polluted city in the world. At the same time, speculative real estate in Lahore exists against the backdrop of Pakistan’s longstanding political and economic instability, which includes a largely unregulated economy, dramatic policy changes imposed by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Action Task Force, and unpredictable currency fluctuations during the 2020 pandemic. While real estate is the most popular form of financial activity in Lahore, it is also extraordinarily risky. Developers routinely sell land before they possess it even though acquisition attempts often fail and government planning permissions to convert agricultural land into urban land are not always received. Local and overseas Pakistanis regularly invest in land despite the long history of fraud and turmoil in the market. Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore with developers, investors and landowners, this paper analyzes how these actors navigate risk through the concept of rizq, or the Islamic belief that despite one’s best efforts, their material possessions are ultimately provided by God. I show how rizq and real estate constitute dual economies between which all debts are eventually settled. Attending to the role of masculinity in this male-dominated market, I also examine how rizq entangles with financialization through the male archetypes of the patron, the patriarch, and the adventurer. At the intersection of Islam, masculinity, and speculative real estate, I argue that rizq enables an audacious mode of speculation that has devastated the landscape of Lahore. This paper presentation will be pre-recorded and read over drone footage collected during fieldwork that highlights the speculative landscape of Lahore. 

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2. A political ecology of speculative urbanism: The role of financial and environmental speculation in Jakarta’s water crisis

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221110883  

   Colven, Emma (July 2022, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space)

   Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, is increasingly characterized by luxury real estate developments and high-profile infrastructural projects made possible by economic liberalization and finance capital. Yet these developments have contributed to Jakarta’s struggles with chronic flooding, land subsidence, and water shortages. This paper contributes an empirical study of the spatial-temporal dynamics of speculative urbanism and the associated impacts on water resources and flood events in Jakarta. I use an urban political ecology approach to analyze mainland and offshore development. First, I show how financial speculation generates flood risk and the overexploitation of water resources, producing uneven socio-spatial distributions of risk. These transformations in Jakarta’s hydroscape in turn threaten to undermine the city’s viability as a site for speculative investment. I thus show how speculative urbanism can be threatened or disrupted by nonhuman agencies. Second, I illustrate a second form of speculation, which I refer to as environmental speculation. As Jakarta’s water crisis has cast doubt on the future of the city itself as a place of habitation, the state explored an ambitious and potentially lucrative coastal defense project, while private developers have engaged in land reclamation. The turn toward offshore development illustrates how environmental speculation creates new opportunities for capital accumulation. I advance two arguments: first, in order to capture the full costs of speculative urbanism, it is imperative that urban scholars attend to its ecological dimensions. Second, an urban political ecology approach advances our understandings of speculative urbanism by illuminating its contradictions and limits. 

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3. Articulation work: Value chains of land assembly and real estate development on a peri-urban frontier

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221107016  

   Gidwani, Vinay; Upadhya, Carol (June 2022, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space)

   If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on detailed interviews with land market intermediaries, operating across different scales, who were instrumental in assembling agricultural land for a large apartment complex, the paper shows how existing forms of social power and local knowledge are harnessed to create inter-scalar linkages that enable the creation and extraction of value in Indian real estate. It makes the case for understanding the economic and cultural work of intermediaries in animating land's value chain as ‘articulation work’. Finally, the paper assesses the varying forms and quantum of value that are generated and captured by different actors in the value chain, which stretches from the landowning farmer up to a major real estate company, to reflect on the micro-dynamics of speculative urbanism and agrarian urbanization. 

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4. Swing Pricing: Theory and Evidence

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-financial-110921-100843  

   Capponi, Agostino; Glasserman, Paul; Weber, Marko (November 2023, Annual Review of Financial Economics)

   Open-end mutual funds offer investors same-day liquidity while holding assets that in some cases take several days to sell. This liquidity transformation creates a potentially destabilizing first-mover advantage: When asset prices fall, investors who exit a fund earlier may pass the liquidation costs generated by their share redemptions to investors who remain in the fund. This incentive becomes particularly acute in periods of market stress, and it can amplify fire-sale spillover losses to other market participants. Swing pricing is a liquidity management tool that targets this first-mover advantage. It allows a fund to adjust or “swing” its net asset value in response to large flows out of or into a mutual fund. This article discusses the industry and regulatory context for swing pricing, and it reviews theory and empirical evidence on the design and effectiveness of swing pricing. The article concludes with directions for further research. 

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5. Market Discipline in the Direct Lending Space

   https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhad081  

   Davydiuk, Tetiana; Marchuk, Tatyana; Rosen, Samuel; Matvos, ed., Gregor (October 2023, The Review of Financial Studies)

   Abstract Using the exclusion of business development companies (BDCs) from stock indexes, this paper studies the effectiveness of market discipline in the direct lending space. Amid share sell-offs by institutional investors, a drop in BDCs’ valuations limits their ability to raise new equity capital. Following this funding shock, BDCs do not adjust their capital structure. At the same time, they are reducing the risk exposure of their portfolios. We document a greater reduction in risk for BDCs subject to stronger market discipline from their debtholders. BDCs pass through the capital shock to their portfolio firms by reducing their investment intensity. 

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