Do institutional investors engage with companies on corporate externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions? And if so, why? We study voting at shareholder meetings by two emblematic global investors: BlackRock, a major asset manager, and the Norway Fund, a responsible sovereign wealth fund....

This paper questions the contribution that socially responsible (SR) screening makes to mutual fund performance. We propose a new decomposition of the variability of SR mutual fund returns making it possible to isolate the contribution of SR screening and compare it with the other traditional...

This chapter studies the votes of institutional investors on shareholder resolutions instructing corporations to mitigate climate change externalities. Our sample includes 238 US fund families that voted on 14,409 different shareholder resolutions at 2,700 companies over the period from 2013 to...

The benchmarks of a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) should take into account the economic and political context behind the creation of the SWF and the role the SWF plays as one part of a government's overall policy. The first benchmark of legitimacy ensures that the capital of the SWF is not...

Asset owners (principals) typically do not manage their own investments and leave this job to delegated managers (agents). What is best for the asset owner, however, is usually not best for the fund manager. Additional agency conflicts arise when the asset owner does not know the quality and...

"Since the after-fee returns of funds-of-funds are, on average, lower than hedge fund returns, it is easy to conclude that funds-of-funds do not add value compared to hedge funds. However, funds-of-funds should not be evaluated relative to hedge fund returns in publicly reported databases....

Since the after-fee returns of funds-of-funds are, on average, lower than hedge fund returns, it is easy to conclude that funds-of-funds do not add value compared to hedge funds. However, funds-of-funds should not be evaluated relative to hedge fund returns in publicly reported databases....

In the approximately 10,000 advisor portfolios that we analyze at the security level, we find there are large common patterns and significant exposures to just a few factors. Advisor portfolios are heavily exposed to economic growth, which is mostly accessed through equities, and could obtain...

Using data on 1,312 US equity active mutual funds with $3.9 trillion in AUM, we analyze the link between funds' “bottoms up” holdings-based environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) scores and funds' active returns, style factor loadings, and alphas. We find that funds with high ESG...