What is patient capital, and where does it exist?

This Special Issue was first motivated by what its co-editors see as a significant lacuna in comparative political economy (CPE): the absence of a modern comparative model of financial markets. CPE, to us, has remained largely stuck with a long-standing dichotomy between bank-based and financial-market-based systems, with the implications for varieties of capitalism with which readers of Socio-Economic Review are very familiar. The result, however, is relatively limited attention to financial markets and financial market actors. There is limited scope to consider the heterogeneity of financial market actors, national differences between financial markets, or processes of change within financial markets. This blind spot is all the more puzzling when set against the extensive study of financial markets across other academic disciplines, even if there is rarely a settled view of the attributes even of specific investor types (see Deeg and Hardie, this volume, for an overview in certain areas).