Bakou Mertens

I am a phd candidate in Economics at Ghent University and work empirically with a large dataset containing all publicly listed firms in the world on corporate financialization and firm behaviour. As I have a background in both political sciences and economics, I try to approach these topics from different perspectives and to contrast and combine insights as well as methods from these very different fields.

However, I am interested in a lot of academic subjects (e.g. labour power, industrial organization) and societal issues (e.g. inequalities and climate change). I love conducting research (most of the time) that is relevant to society, as well as communicating research to the broader public and advocating for societal change. Research does not, can not, and should not happen in a societal void. Therefore, I - with a friend - had some side research projects, such as, for example, retrieving Belgian historical income tax rates from archives and simulating their potential current effects.

Anyway, if you would like to work on fun stuff together, have a question or suggestion about my research or just want to discuss some interesting ideas, do not hesitate to reach out !

Interests: financialization, political economy, corporate governance, shareholder power, industrial organization, empirical methods, data analysis and data visualization in R, inequalities, taxation, macroeconomics, history of economics, … love it all!

Research I am currently working on

1. Title: When shareholder power kicks in: Corporate financialization as ratchet behaviour and sticky payouts
   Now out in Socio-Economic Review!
   Short summary on this website and thread on Twitter and Bluesky Also available on ResearchGate and as WP of my Department

2. Title: The sticky and the slippy: do payouts crowd out investments? Causal evidence from ratchet behaviour.
   Working Paper available on ResearchGate and in the Working papers Series of my Department. Will be submitted to Cambridge Journal of Economics soon

3. Title: A world view on corporate financialization and an empirical (de)construction of payout ratios: the importance of losses, maturity and downward rigidity.
   R&R, but sidetracked at the moment. A descriptive paper detailing severe data issues in existing empirical work, offering insights on the importance of loss making companies and evaluating the impact of methodological choices on reported outcomes. Still needs some work.

4. Title: Productivity, market power and rent sharing. A Regression discontinuity design.
   Submission Fall 2025

5. Title: Do markups matter? Exploring corporate financialization across the market power dimension.
   Submission Fall 2025

6. Title: Labour as successful counterveiling power or as battered stakeholder?
   Submission Fall 2025

7. Title: Bundling the insights from the papers above and translating them for the finance guys, aiming for Journal of Financial Economics.
   Submission Spring 2026

8. Title: Weighing in on the debate on the EU-US divide in productivity growth.
   Submission Spring 2026