The Rise of Institutional Investors

During the last decades, institutional investors gained an ever more important position as managers of assets and owners of corporations. By demanding (short-term) shareholder value, some of them have driven the financialization of corporations and of the financial sector itself. This chapter first characterizes the specific roles that private equity funds, hedge funds, and mutual funds have played in this development. It then moves on to focus on one group of institutional investors that is rapidly becoming a pivotal factor for corporate control in many countries – the “Big Three” large passive asset managers BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.