The Ecuadorian Securities Market: a sociological account of an apparent failure

Andrés Chiriboga

Thursday May 11th, 3 pm, Sciences Po.

Jury:

• Valérie BOUSSARD, Professeure de sociologie, Université Paris Nanterre
• Felix BÜHLMANN, Professeur associé, Université de Lausanne
• Bruce CARRUTHERS, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University
• Olivier GODECHOT, Directeur de recherche CNRS, Sciences Po Paris (supervisor)
• Paola TUBARO, Directrice de recherche CNRS, ENSAE-CREST Paris (reviewer)
• Tod VAN GUNTEN, Lecturer in Economic Sociology, University of Edinburgh (reviewer)

This dissertation explains the peculiar evolution of Ecuador's securities market —an inefficient but functional market— by examining how personal, business, and regional ties influence economic transactions and their outcomes.  The structural embeddedness approach is used as a starting point and is advanced it by showing that different social devices, such as regionalism and power imbalances, that have been largely treated separately can be studied as coexisting firm-to-firm ties. The thesis uses a mixed-methods approach to explain how brokerage hiring and trading depend on the existence of multiple social ties that emerge from the country's political economy, and that show how actors develop strategies to maintain or strengthen their advantaged positions. Evidence suggests that the use of trading strategies and their combination in the long run also have social roots. Most strategies increase the profits of brokerage firms and at the same time hinder the overall development of the market. In this sense, this research challenges previous views that have quickly judged this and other Latin American securities markets as failures. The complex social life of this type of incumbent market may not contribute to its global development, but it is not detrimental to individual profits and does not deviate from the effects and consequences of financialization in terms of the concentration of capital and the deepening of inequalities.