IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jacrfn/v13y2000i3p92-104.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Growth Of Institutional Stock Ownership: A Promise Unfulfilled

Author

Listed:
  • Franklin R. Edwards
  • R. Glenn Hubbard

Abstract

Despite the substantial growth of institutional ownership of U.S. corporations in the past 20 years, there is little evidence that institutional investors have acquired the kind of concentrated ownership positions required to be able to play a dominant role in the corporate governance process. Institutional ownership remains widely dispersed among firms and institutions in large part because of significant legal obstacles that discourage institutional investors both from taking large block positions and from exercising large ownership positions to control corporate managers. Thus, although much of the growth of institutional ownership since 1980 has been accounted for by the growth of mutual funds and private pension funds, there continue to be strong deterrents to the accumulation and use of large ownership positions to influence corporate managers. Another potentially important factor discouraging concentrated investments are incentive schemes that effectively reward money managers for producing returns that do not vary much from the S&P 500 (or whatever sector the manager is supposed to be representing). Using a very different incentive scheme that offers managers a share of the excess returns (as well as penalties for failure to meet benchmarks), a relatively new class of “hedge funds” has emerged that provides both more concentrated ownership positions and higher risk‐adjusted rates of return. To encourage mutual funds to take a more activist corporate governance role and to behave more like hedge funds, the authors recommend that current legal restrictions on mutual funds be relaxed so that mutual funds have a greater incentive to hold large ownership positions in companies and to use those positions to more effectively monitor corporate managers. In particular, the “five and ten” portfolio rules applicable to mutual funds could be repealed and replaced with a standard of prudence and diligence more in keeping with portfolio theory; mutual funds could be given greater freedom to adopt redemption policies that would be more conducive to holding larger ownership positions; and institutional investors could be permitted to employ a variety of incentive fee structures to encourage fund managers to pursue more pro‐active investment strategies. The prospect of actively involving institutional fund managers in the corporate governance process may be our best hope for improving U.S. corporate governance.

Suggested Citation

  • Franklin R. Edwards & R. Glenn Hubbard, 2000. "The Growth Of Institutional Stock Ownership: A Promise Unfulfilled," Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Morgan Stanley, vol. 13(3), pages 92-104, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jacrfn:v:13:y:2000:i:3:p:92-104
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6622.2000.tb00069.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6622.2000.tb00069.x
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1745-6622.2000.tb00069.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Becht, Marco & Bolton, Patrick & Roell, Ailsa, 2003. "Corporate governance and control," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 1, pages 1-109, Elsevier.
    2. Maria Goranova & Lori Verstegen Ryan, 2022. "The Corporate Objective Revisited: The Shareholder Perspective," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(2), pages 526-554, March.
    3. Lin, Philip T. & Li, Bin & Bu, Danlu, 2015. "The relationship between corporate governance and community engagement: Evidence from the Australian mining companies," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 28-39.
    4. repec:bla:jomstd:v:47:y:2010:i:s2:p:1561-1589 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Xu, Xijia, 2009. "Aligning debt and equity claimant interests: Evidence from dual claim investors," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(12), pages 2227-2240, December.
    6. Wang, Li-Hsun & Lin, Chu-Hsiung & Fung, Hung-Gay & Chen, Hsien-Ming, 2015. "Governance mechanisms and downside risk," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 35(PB), pages 485-498.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jacrfn:v:13:y:2000:i:3:p:92-104. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=1078-1196 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.