A new article by the CORPNET group has been published in the June 2017 issue of the Antitrust Chronicle (pp. 51-57). The piece, “The New Mandate Owners: Passive Asset Managers and the Decoupling of Corporate Ownership”, is written by Carmel Shenkar, Eelke Heemskerk and Jan Fichtner and can be found here.
Abstract A major shift toward passively managed index funds in recent years has led to the re-concentration of corporate ownership in the hands of just three large asset management firms, the Big Three: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. We propose that this trend has re-structured ownership in capital markets. Adopting a contractual view to the corporate share, we re-define share holding and suggest that the New Mandate Owners in fact hold the essence of corporate power, as their aggregated positions capture the core element of the franchise of corporate voting.