@book{7c266b049bb644f5a462a9805a629b65,
title = "Against Hollow Firms: Repurposing the Corporation for a More Resilient Economy",
abstract = "The Covid-19 pandemic is revealing latent weaknesses at large, well-established companies who may now require state support. This report argues that those weaknesses pre-date the current pandemic and are a consequence of excesses in the non-financial corporate sector during the post-2008 economy. Those excesses include: i) historically high levels of dividends and buybacks which, in many cases, exceeded earnings and hollowed out reserves ii) the growth of low-prime debt, which risks being downgraded to junk in the current crisis and iii) a build-up of {\textquoteleft}fair valued{\textquoteright} assets, often intangible assets such as goodwill, which are vulnerable to write downs that could push firms into negative shareholder equity.",
keywords = "Financialization, COVID-19, Dividends, Share buybacks, Creative accounting, Corporate collapse, Financialization, COVID-19, Dividends, Share buybacks, Creative accounting, Corporate collapse",
author = "Andrew Baker and Colin Haslam and Adam Leaver and Richard Murphy and Leonard Seabrooke and Saila Stausholm and Duncan Wigan",
year = "2020",
language = "English",
series = "Report. Centre for Research on Accounting and Finance in Context (CRAFiC)",
publisher = "University of Sheffield",
address = "United Kingdom",
}