Congratulations to Felix Maile on his sucessful PhD defense

We are delighted to share that REMASS team member Felix Maile has successfully defended his PhD thesis “Financialization and value capture in global value chains: Lead firm strategies and the supplier squeeze in the global apparel Industry.”

His dissertation explores the distribution of profits over 30 years of globalization, offering a rich analysis of how value is created and captured among shareholders, multinational corporations, contract manufacturers, and workers along global value chains. By focusing on the corporate strategies of lead firms and the resulting ‘supplier squeeze’ in the global apparel sector, this work sheds light on the deeply unequal distribution of economic gains in the modern global economy, where shareholders capture the productivity gains achieved by workers and supplier firms.

His research makes a highly valuable contribution to our REMASS methodology. It demonstrates how we can link large, firm-level datasets on financial stocks and flows, which map the macro-patterns of profit distribution, with rich qualitative insights from expert interviews that help explain the underlying drivers of these patterns. This dual-method approach strengthens our analytical toolkit for studying global production and financial networks.

We warmly congratulate Felix on this important milestone and are excited to continue our collaboration within the REMASS project team.

We wish him every success as he moves forward in his scientific career!