The Investment Strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds
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Schoar_The investment.pdf
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508.39 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Bernstein, Shai
Lerner, Josh
Schoar, Antoinette
Date Issued
February 2013
Journal
Journal of Economic Perspectives
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Bernstein, Shai, Josh Lerner, and Antoinette Schoar. “The Investment Strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 2 (February 2013): 219–238. © 2013 American Economic Association
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Sovereign wealth funds have emerged as major investors in corporate and real resources worldwide. After an overview of their magnitude, we consider the institutional arrangements under which many of the sovereign wealth funds operate. We focus on a specific set of agency problems that is of first-order importance for these funds: that is, the direct involvement of political leaders in the management process. We show that sovereign wealth funds with greater involvement of political leaders in fund management are associated with investment strategies that seem to favor short-term economic policy goals in their respective countries at the expense of longer-term maximization of returns. Sovereign wealth funds face several other issues, like how best to cope with demands for transparency, which can allow others to copy their investment strategies, and how to address the problems that arise with sheer size, like the difficulties of scaling up investment strategies that only work with a smaller value of assets under investment. In the conclusion, we discuss how various approaches cultivated by effective institutional investors worldwide -- from investing in the best people to pioneering new asset classes to compartmentalizing investment activities -- may provide clues as to how sovereign wealth funds might address these issues.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.27.2.219
