The Systemic Governance Influence of Universal Owners: Evidence from an Expectation Document

Abstract

Universal owners can systemically diffuse their investment preferences to a large share of the market. We use the unexpected release of a corporate governance expectation document by Norway’s sovereign wealth fund as a natural experiment to understand how active universal investors can influence firms. We introduce a new decomposition to explore the effectiveness of this distinct activism tool. We show how firms adapted to the fund’s new portfolio-wide governance expectations and explore their heterogeneous response across ownership levels and firm characteristics. We also show how the fund changed it’s investment policy to meet it’s new stated preferences.