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Purpose – Examine the role of institutional investors in accelerating the development of capital markets and economies abroad, the determinants of their investment, both in the domestic and foreign markets, and their importance in promoting good corporate governance practices worldwide and facilitating increased financial integration.

Methodology/approach – Review and synthesize recent academic literature (1970–2011) on the process of international financial integration and the role of foreign institutional investors in the increasingly global financial markets.

Findings – Despite the concern that short-term flow of international capital can be destructive to the emerging and developing market economies, academic evidence on a destabilizing effect of foreign investment activity is limited. Institutional investors’ systematic preference for stocks of large, well-known, globally visible foreign firms can explain the presence of a home bias in international portfolio investment.

Research limitations – Given the breadth of the two literature streams, only representative studies (over 45 published works) are summarized.

Social implications – Regulators of emerging markets should first improve domestic institutions, governance, and macroeconomic fundamentals, and then deregulate domestic financial and capital markets to avoid economic and financial crises in the initial stages of liberalization reforms.

Originality/value of paper – A useful source of information for graduate students, academics, and practitioners on the importance of foreign institutional investors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the monitoring role exerted by large institutional investors and their ability to restrict the earnings management practices conducted around seasoned equity offerings (SEOs).

The sample includes 130 French SEOs by non-regulated firms during 2004-2015. The authors used various cross-section, univariate and multivariate tests using several proxies for earnings management. They attempt to highlight that firms issuing SEOs are more able to manage earnings around SEOs owing to the predominance of large speculative institutional investors. Noteworthy, the monitoring role exerted by sophisticated institutional investors turns out to restrict the earnings management opportunities surrounding a SEOs event.

The results show that the issuing firms tend to manipulate earnings in an upward trend with respect to the year preceding the SEO offer. Thus, a special attention has been drawn on the fact that the issuing companies strive to prove their ability to manage earnings around SEOs in presence of large speculative institutional investors.

The results provide useful insights into the role different types of institutional investors play in terms of enhancing both governance and accounting information quality.

This paper adds to the literature questioning the evidence that institutional investor activism frequently engage in misleading earnings management around corporate events. The authors provide an alternative explanation for earnings management around SEOs in the French context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how shareholder engagement on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues is informally exercised by a large global institutional investor with locally embedded, geographically remote firms. This field is still a new area of research due to a scarcity of data, and because ordinarily, private engagement activities are conducted confidentially. Therefore, the paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by studying the private corporate engagement activities of a large UK-based institutional investor on ESG issues with Japanese investee firms in order to achieve a greater understanding of the under-researched area of corporate social responsibility.

The authors employ a multi-method approach to analyse engagement activities by the institutional investor. The authors have obtained a unique data set of the institutional investor’s engagement activities. The institutional investor is UK-based, has a long history of active engagement, and is considered one of the oldest and largest specialists in responsible investment. Further, the authors have conducted several in-depth interviews with a UK-based ESG service provider as well as one of the largest Japanese trust companies.

First, it is found that main target firms of engagement activities are large firms with global operations, and that corporate governance issues are the most important engagement topic in Japan. Second, in trying to effectively exercise voice across societies, engagement activities are conducted with geographically remote target firms on various ESG agendas in a self-enforcing, face-to-face, and sometimes collective manner. Finally, this study argues for the gap between the asset manager’s motivation to engage and local target firms’ readiness to respond due to corporate organisational and language issues.

The authors contribute to social responsibility literature by focusing on the role of global investors in Japan to diffuse global standards. This area has been largely neglected in this stream of literature, despite the increasing presence of foreign investors in Japan. This is one of the first attempts to analyse a global investor’s engagement strategies with one specific country outside of the USA and Europe. Further, within the literature on shareholder engagement, this is the first paper that focuses on the means of engagement activities and the responses by target firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between institutional investor ownership and the compensation of executives at US banks during the financial crisis period.

This paper uses a linear regression model to examine the association between institutional ownership and the level of executive compensation at US banks.

Institutional investors influence executive compensation at banks with the impact being most pronounced for the CEO. Ownership by the top five investors is associated with greater total compensation. Active investors have the strongest impact on executive compensation as evidenced by a positive association between active ownership and both equity compensation and total compensation. As well, active ownership is negatively associated with bonus compensation. The paper also finds that passive and grey investors influence compensation but to a less significant extent than active investors.

The results suggest that the monitoring role of active and passive institutional investors is different in the banking industry. As well, institutional investors were likely a driving factor in shaping the compensation packages of the top executive team during the financial crisis period.

Stakeholders at banks should be aware that not all types of institutional investors act as effective monitors over issues such as controlling the amount of executive compensation paid to the highest paid executive, the CEO. Prospective investors should consider the type of institutional investor that owns large blocks of equity when making an investment decision. Namely, the interests of existing institutional investors may differ from their own interests.

This paper provides a new perspective on the monitoring roles played by different types of institutional investors. Furthermore, it provides a more comprehensive analysis by investigating the role of institutional investors in shaping the compensation packages of CEOs and other top executives including chief financial officers (CFOs) who play a vital role in risk management at banks.

Institutional investors have increasingly gained importance since the early 1990s. The assets under management in these funds have increased threefold since 1990 to reach more than US$45 trillion in 2005, including over US$20 trillion in equity (Ferreira & Matos, 2008). Further, the value of institutional investors' assets represents roughly 162.6% of the OECD gross domestic product in 2005 (Gonnard, Kim, & Ynesta, 2008). Given the magnitude of institutional investors' holdings relative to the world market capitalization, challenging questions on the economic role of these investors have been raised. One such question concerns their impact on the stability of stock markets. On the one hand, active strategies of buying and selling shares by these investors may contribute to moving stock prices away from their fundamental values. On the other hand, if all institutional investors react to the same information in a timely manner, they are in fact helping to increase market efficiency by speeding up the adjustment of prices to new fundamentals (for competing theories on the role of institutional investors, see, e.g., Lakonishok, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1992). This view of institutional investors as “efficiency drivers” generated considerable debate for many years (see, e.g., Ferreira & Laux, 2007; French & Roll, 1986).

Using initial public offering (IPO) involuntary delisting data, this chapter examines whether and how motivated institutional investors affect the survivability of IPO firms. The empirical evidence shows that the likelihood of future delisting is much lower for IPOs with more motivated institutional investors. This impact is more pronounced for firms with higher information asymmetry. The motivated institutional investors also facilitate better post-IPO operating performance. The results are consistent with the prediction of the limited attention theory.

This study aims to investigate whether underwriters exercise their allocation discretion to offer favorable discounts to institutional investors.

The research covers 173 offerings at Borsa Istanbul between 2010 and September 2021. Two hypotheses related to allocation discretion are developed and tested by means of probit, ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares regressions. Heckman selection regressions are used for robustness tests.

Allocation discretion is catered toward institutional investors who account for more than 56% of all initial allocations adjusted by gross proceeds. Close to 84% of all gross proceeds come from offerings that allocation discretion is exercised. These discretionary offerings are sold with larger price discounts, yet provide lower initial returns, while evidence points to reallocation to retail investors due to weak demand from institutional investors.

Despite using the population of firms in the research period, the sample size is small relative to more developed markets. The research period cannot be extended because allocation discretion is allowed in 2010.

The research highlights the importance of institutional and foreign investors to the equity markets. This issue is relevant due to the ongoing flight of foreign investors from emerging economies and the increasing participation of small investors in the stock markets.

The study cautions retail investors against greater (re)allocations by underwriters who may seek to compensate for the loss of their foreign investor base and urges policymakers to regain foreign investors.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research paper to use actual discounts disclosed in the prospectus to test the predictions related to allocation discretion. The study also contributes to the emerging markets literature by documenting allocation practices of the Turkish underwriters for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of long horizon institutional ownership on CEO career concerns to meet the short-term earnings benchmark.

Using a sample of 10,565 firm-year observations in the USA, the paper examines the extent to which long horizon institutional investors mitigate the positive relation between CEO turnover and missing the quarterly consensus analyst forecast.

After controlling for the general performance-turnover relation, this paper finds that long horizon institutional investors mitigate the positive relation between CEO turnover and missing the quarterly consensus analyst forecast. This finding is stronger when CEOs focus on long-term value creation and do not sacrifice long-term value to boost current earnings and is stronger when the monitoring intensity by long horizon institutional investors is greater.

The results suggest that long horizon institutional investors serve a monitoring role in alleviating CEO career concerns to meet the short-term earnings benchmark.

This paper contributes to the literature on the relation between long horizon institutional ownership and attenuated managerial short-termism. The literature is silent about why long horizon institutional investors alleviate managerial short-termism. This paper fills this void in the literature by documenting that long horizon institutional investors mitigate CEO career concerns for managerial short-termism. Moreover, this paper contributes to the literature on the monitoring role of institutional investors by documenting the incremental effect of institutional ownership on CEO career concerns to meet the short-term earnings benchmark.

Prior studies examining the relation between the shareholdings by institutional investors and firm value have produced mixed results. These studies have assumed that a linear relation exists between corporate value and institutional shareholdings. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the nature of this relationship and by partitioning institutional investors into institutions that have appointed a representative to the board of directors of the firms in which they have a block investment and institutions with a similar holding but without a representative on the board of directors.

The study is based on a sample of 123 firms with available financial and institutional ownership data. A cross‐sectional regression analysis is used to test the relation between corporate value and institutional ownership with and without board representation.

The results of the study suggest that share ownership by investors with board representation is positively related to the value of the firm at lower levels of ownership. However, as the share ownership increases, the impact on the value of the firm becomes negative, giving rise to a non‐linear relation. The extent of shareholding by institutions without board representation, on the other hand, is not related to the value of the firm.

The findings show that institutions with board representation have greater incentives to monitor management, and therefore their presence should have a positive influence on firm value. However, at high levels of ownership, institutional investors with board representation may induce boards of directors to make sub‐optimal decisions.

The study provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between firm value and institutional ownership. That is, the effect of shareholding by institutions with board representation is likely to have a non‐linear relation with firm value.