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TERRA ECONOMICUS

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  • A scholar at the service of a banker? Household financialization rhetoric in academic publications

A scholar at the service of a banker? Household financialization rhetoric in academic publications


TERRA ECONOMICUS, Vol. 24, No 1

Citation: Vernikov A., Kurysheva A. (2026). A scholar at the service of a banker? Household financialization rhetoric in academic publications. Terra Economicus 24(1), 37–52 (in Russian). DOI: 10.18522/2073-6606-2026-24-1-37-52


We examine how Russian economists in their articles assess the financialization of households through consumer lending. The sample consisted of 106 academic texts published between 1998 and 2024 in journals included in the Russian Science Citation Index database. We aimed to identify their connotations with respect to consumer lending through sociological discourse analysis. The findings show that the research papers by Russian academic economists are far from being ideologically neutral. Most of these articles contain the elements which we interpret as a part of typical discourse apologizing the practice of lending to households, namely, developing and promoting the ideas of credit expansion of banks in the household sector. In this regard, economists are rather on the side of the lenders, the owners of financial capital, than on the side of the borrowers. The thrust of most economic texts differs from the rhetoric of other social scientists, who emphasize the negative social consequences of the household financializaton. The article contributes to the literature at the intersection of development economics, institutional economics and consumer economics. In practical terms, our findings relate to socio-economic policies to tackle with the problem of economic imbalances and disproportions caused by ongoing financialization and deindustrialization.

Keywords: financialization; institutional economics; precedence of consumption; debt dependence; development economics; economic disproportions
JEL codes: A2, B52, G51, I25, O10


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Publisher: Southern Federal University
ISSN: 2073-6606