Abstract
A growing literature suggests that ‘financialisation’ may weaken the performance of non-financial corporations and constrain the growth of aggregate demand. This paper uses two alternative approaches—one derived from Skott and one from Lavoie and Godley—and two different settings—a labour-constrained setting and a dual-economy setting—to evaluate some of the claims that have been made. Our analysis, which pays explicit attention to financial stock–flow relations, suggests that the qualitative effects of ‘financialisation’ are insensitive to the precise specification of household saving behaviour but depend critically on the labour market assumptions (labour-constrained versus dual) and the specification of the investment function (Harrodian versus Kaleckian).