OECD Corporate Governance Working Papers
OECD Corporate Governance Working Papers provide timely analysis and information on national and international corporate governance issues and developments, including state ownership and privatisation policies. The working paper series is designed to make select studies by the OECD Corporate Governance Committee, OECD staff members and outside consultants available to a broad audience.
- ISSN: 22230939 (online)
- https://doi.org/10.1787/22230939
Institutional Investors as Owners
Who Are They and What Do They Do?
This paper provides a framework for analysing the character and degree of ownership engagement by institutional investors. It argues that the general term “institutional investor” in itself doesn’t say very much about the quality or degree of ownership engagement. It is therefore an evasive “shorthand” for policy discussions about ownership engagement. The reason is that there are large differences in ownership engagement between different categories of institutional investors. There are also differences in ownership engagement within the same category of institutional investors such as hedge funds, investment funds, etc. These differences arise from the fact that the degree of ownership engagement is determined by a number of different features and choices that together make up the institutional investor’s “business model”. When ownership engagement is not a central part of the business model, public policies and voluntary standards aiming to improve the quality of ownership engagement among institutional investors are likely to have limited effect. Based on an empirical overview of the relative size of different categories of institutional investors, the paper identifies a set of 7 features and 19 choices that in different combinations define the institutional investor’s business model. These features and choices are then used to establish a taxonomy for identifying different degrees of ownership engagement ranging from “no engagement” to “inside engagement”.
Keywords: corporate governance, shareholder engagement, incentives, institutional investors, shareholder activism
JEL:
G30: Financial Economics / Corporate Finance and Governance / Corporate Finance and Governance: General;
G38: Financial Economics / Corporate Finance and Governance / Corporate Finance and Governance: Government Policy and Regulation;
G32: Financial Economics / Corporate Finance and Governance / Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill;
G34: Financial Economics / Corporate Finance and Governance / Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
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