No abstract

State-owned investors (SOIs), including sovereign wealth funds and public pension funds, have $27 trillion in assets under management in 2020, making these funds the third largest group of asset owners globally. SOIs have become the largest and are among the most important private equity investors, and they are key investors in other alternative asset investments such as real estate, infrastructure, and hedge funds. SOIs are also leaders in promoting environmental, social, and governance policies and corporate social responsibility policies in investee companies. We document the rise of SOIs, assess their current investment policies, and describe how their state ownership both constrains and enhances their investment opportunity sets. We survey the most impactful recent academic research on sovereign wealth funds, public pension funds, and their closest financial analogs, private pension funds. We also introduce a new Governance-Sustainability-Resilience Scoreboard for SOIs and survey research examining their role in promoting good corporate governance.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have over $11.5 trillion in assets under management as of February 2023. Most of these 176 funds are sponsored by non-Western countries and their growth has made SWFs important international investors, particularly in private equity funding. We first define SWFs, then discuss their evolution into today's categories of stabilization, savings, and development/strategic funds. We discuss the documented importance of SWF funding sources -oil sales revenues versus excess reserves from export earnings -and summarize the empirical literature studying how SWFs allocate funds geographically and across asset classes. Next, we summarize empirical evidence on the impact of SWF stock investments on target firm financial and operating performance and discuss the evidence showing that the announcement of SWF investment causes target firm stock prices to rise in the short term, but the positive impact is significantly less than the positive return following large stock purchases by private investors, and the longer-term effect of SWF investment on target firms is generally negative. SWFs' recent focus on promoting ESG policies of investee companies is assessed and briefly compared to the effectiveness of other institutional investors' ESG efforts.