Law Commons^™

Institutional Investors And The New Corporate Governance, Jayne W. Barnard

Faculty Publications

During the last decade, American capital markets have experienced a marked shift from a constituency made up primarily of household investors to one made up primarily of institutional investors. Institutional investors are fiduciary bodies such as pension funds, mutual funds, and employee stock ownership plans, representing large numbers of beneficiaries. As collective entitites, institutional investors often amass billions of dollars in assets, thus giving them the potential for substantial influence on the companies in which they invest. In recent years, some institutional investors have sought to use this influence to challenge traditional patterns of corporate governance, claiming that new patterns …