WHO ARE THE

SHAREHOLDERS?

The shareholder is a fiction. Corporations aren’t a myth. Shareholders are.

The late Lynn Stout, author of The Shareholder Value Myth

REPORT BY SUSAN R. HOLMBERG

JUNE 2018
 ABOUT THE ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE

Until the rules work for every American, they’re not working.
The Roosevelt Institute asks: What does a better society look like?
Armed with a bold vision for the future, we push the economic and social
debate forward. We believe that those at the top hold too much power
and wealth, and that our economy will be stronger when that changes.
Ultimately, we want our work to move the country toward a new
economic and political system: one built by many for the good of all.

It will take all of us to rewrite the rules. From emerging leaders to Nobel
laureate economists, we’ve built a network of thousands. At Roosevelt,
we make influencers more thoughtful and thinkers more influential.
We also celebrate—and are inspired by—those whose work embodies
the values of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and carries their
vision forward today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Susan R. Holmberg is a political economist and a Fellow at This report is dedicated to Lynn
the Roosevelt Institute, where she researches and writes on Stout (1957-2018), who led the
inequality, corporate governance, and climate change issues. charge against shareholder
Holmberg is the author and co-author of numerous primacy. The fight is going to be so
publications and reports, including The Hidden Rules of Race, much harder without her. Special
Boiling Points, Rewriting the Rules (with Roosevelt Chief thanks go to Katy Milani, who has
Economist Joseph Stiglitz), and The Atlantic essay, “Can CEO expertly shepherded this paper
Pay Ever Be Reeled In?” from conception to completion.
Much gratitude also goes to Nell
Abernathy, Kendra Bozarth,
Andrea Flynn, William Lazonick,
J.W. Mason, Lenore Palladino, and
Marshall Steinbaum.

This report was made possible

with generous support from the
Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg
Foundation, and Arca Foundation.
 DEDICATED TO THE LATE, GREAT SCHOLAR LYNN STOUT (1957-2018)

Executive Summary
Since the end of the managerial capitalism era in about 1980—when corporate executives
managed companies for the long term, workers had more bargaining power and greater
economic security, and the economy was truly dynamic—corporations have singularly
devoted themselves to shareholders at the expense of all other corporate stakeholders,
particularly workers and consumers. Yet, for all of their influence in the current era of
shareholder primacy, most of us do not actually understand who shareholders are, the role
they play in our economy and society today, and the power they’ve amassed over the past
few decades.

This report demystifies shareholders by breaking them up into three dimensions: their
identity—who shareholders are in terms of demographics (predominantly wealthy and
white households); their role, which challenges two mainstream conceptions about the
functions that shareholders serve—that shareholders are direct owners of corporations
and that they serve an ongoing funding role long after a company has gone public; and
their power, which is concentrated in the hands of institutional investors, including
activist hedge funds, and has directly shaped outcomes that prioritize shareholders first
at the expense of everyone else, including depleted corporate investment, stagnate worker
wages, concentrated corporate power, and rising economic inequality.

The discussion about the identity and role of shareholders should be ample motivation
for policymakers who care about the groups left behind in today’s high-profit, low-wage
economy—including people of color, low-wage workers, and many in the middle class—to
change the system. Not only is the theoretical justification for shareholder-first ideology
anemic at best, but also the “benefits,” or payouts, are going to mostly white, wealthy
households. We cannot create good jobs, raise median wages, and, more broadly, address
economic inequality, especially racial inequality, without replacing shareholder primacy
with a better system of rules that shape corporate behavior. Furthermore, our analysis of
shareholder power shows that dismantling shareholder primacy will require structural
reforms that directly target the outsized power of institutional shareholders and the
incentives that drive their decision-making.

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Introduction
The ideology of “shareholder primacy” has molded 21st century American capitalism.
The belief that businesses should function solely to profit this sole group of corporate
stakeholders—to “maximize shareholder value”—has had a profound and toxic effect
on our economy. Despite rising corporate profits, a broad shift in the balance of power
towards shareholders and their obsession with next-quarter’s share price (coined “short-
termism”) has led to the widespread extraction of productive value from businesses, with
vast economic consequences—including disinvestment in productive economic growth,
the dismantling of workers’ economic security, and the weakening of America’s long-term
competitive edge in the global economy.

Thankfully shareholder primacy (or shareholder-first capitalism, as we also call it) and
its consequences are garnering increasing attention. Larry Fink, the CEO of the colossal
global investment firm BlackRock, made waves by calling on companies to stop focusing
on quarterly stock returns (2018). Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) recently
introduced the Reward Work Act: legislation to regulate stock buybacks, a legal practice
that allows companies to manipulate their own stock price to raise its value. Even Forbes,
a mainstream business magazine, is continually calling out shareholder-first corporate
behavior for driving inequality, leeching productive value out of companies, and even
threatening our constitution (Georgescu 2018).

Now that shareholder primacy is coming to the forefront of our economic debates, we need
to think carefully about how to dismantle it—however, we cannot address this problem
without first identifying who shareholders are, how they behave, and what this means for
broader economic outcomes. Lynn Stout, the late, great legal scholar who led the charge
against shareholder primacy, argued that in order to weaken the hold shareholder primacy
has over our economy, it’s crucial that, first, we better understand shareholders. “Why is
[the theory of ] shareholder [primacy] value going wrong? [...] We don’t understand what
shareholders are” (Stout 2012). We take this statement to mean that many Americans—
including policymakers, advocates, and voters—are unclear about who shareholders are,
what their purpose is, and the kind of power they have over corporate decisions and our
economy and society at large.

This inadequate understanding exists on both the right and the left. Referring to 2017 gains
in the stock market, President Donald Trump asked a rally crowd, “How’s your 401(k)
doing?” despite the fact that just under half of the country, and many of his supporters, don’t
own any stock at all. Indeed, many policymakers talk about the stock market as if there are
no barriers to entry and all Americans benefit equally. Meanwhile, some on the left have a

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tendency to paint all shareholders as the wealthy elite. Certainly wealthy, white Americans
own the most stock, yet many shareholders, particularly through pension funds, are middle
class workers and inherently prefer that American corporations prioritize long-term
strategies rather than disinvest simply for the sake of next-quarter returns. This is precisely
why, since the early 1990s, unions have wielded their investor power—via public pension
funds—as a core strategy for holding corporations accountable.

Now that shareholder primacy is coming to the

forefront of our economic debates, we need to think
carefully about how to dismantle it—however, we
cannot address this problem without first identifying
who shareholders are, how they behave, and what
this means for broader economic outcomes.

With Stout’s argument in mind, the purpose of this report is to lift the veil from
shareholders by explaining 1) their identity, 2) their role, and 3) their power. By explaining
the demographic identity of shareholders, we challenge the notion that many Americans
have a stake in the stock market. Instead, most people, particularly people of color, have
not only been excluded from the benefits of today’s shareholder-first economy, they have,
in fact, been harmed by it. By examining the role of shareholders, we contest two common
assumptions: first, that they are owners of corporations; and, second, that they provide the
lions’ share of financing for public corporations. By challenging these two premises, which
have long buttressed shareholder primacy, we argue that the theoretical justification for
the current rules that define corporate behavior is abating. Finally, we describe the power
that shareholders have to influence the decisions of corporate executives and boards, how
this power is unequally distributed, and how this imbalance drives extractive, short-term
oriented trends in our economy.

The discussion about the identity and role of shareholders should be plenty to motivate
policymakers who care about the groups left behind by today’s high-profit, low-wage
economy to change the system. Not only is the theoretical justification for shareholder-
first ideology anemic at best, but also the “benefits” are going to mostly white, wealthy
households at the expense of middle-class and low-wage workers, including people of color.
We cannot create good jobs, raise median wages, and, more broadly, address racial economic
inequality without replacing shareholder primacy with a better system of rules that shape
corporate behavior.

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If a better understanding of the role and identity of shareholders provides motivation for
why we should dismantle shareholder primacy, our discussion of shareholder power tells us
how we should do it. The power some shareholders wield to influence corporate strategy is
mostly in the hands of institutional shareholders—particularly “activist” hedge funds that
aggressively pressure corporations to extract value for their own profit. Even institutional
investors that aren’t as aggressive—many pension funds, mutual funds, and endowments, for
example—are reinforcing the same behavior (with their approval votes) because of their own
incentives for high returns. The power structure across the investor class suggests that curbing
shareholder primacy will require structural reforms that target the power and incentives of
institutional shareholders in order to rewrite the rules that shape corporate behavior.

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DIMENSION ONE

The Identity of Shareholders

Who are shareholders? Despite the prevailing narrative, there are fewer American shareholders
than believed, and they represent a narrow segment of our population. The press—and many
politicians—tends to say that the market has been democratized, or that it is accessible to
most, if not all, Americans. (Perhaps this is what has made shareholder primacy so politically
palatable; why shouldn’t American corporations serve shareholders if so much of the American
public fall into that class?) Yet, broad stock ownership across American society is a myth.
While largely due to a shift from pension funds to 401(k) accounts—approximately half of U.S.
households do own some stock—the value of this ownership is often in very small amounts. In
reality, the top income tier in the U.S. holds the majority of stocks, and the resulting
disparities in stock ownership are a core contributor to America’s wealth inequality,
including the widening racial wealth gap. As much progress as we’ve made to understand
the dynamics and effects of shareholder primacy, we have a lot of work to do to understand how
it exacerbates economic inequality, particularly existing race and gender1 disparities.

SHARE OWNERSHIP INEQUALITY

Disparities in stock ownership are well situated in America’s broader economic inequality
problem—in which 20 percent of all income currently goes to the 1 percent, a group that
held 35 percent of the total value of wealth in 2015 (Wolff 2017). The racial income and
wealth gaps in today’s high-profit, low-wage economy are even more troubling. Black
households earn just 59 cents for every dollar of white median household income (Flynn
et al. 2017). In 2016, white families’ wealth was seven times larger than that of black wealth
and five times greater than for Latinx families (Darity et al. 2018).

These disparities are of course mirrored—and driven—by disparities in stock ownership.

Less than 14 percent of American households own corporate stock directly.2 Most of this
ownership is concentrated among the wealthy, who receive a larger portion of their income
from capital gains, while the working poor and middle class earn mainly wage and salary
incomes. The middle class only owns 8 percent of all stock; by comparison, the top 1 percent
owns almost 40 percent (Wolff 2017).

1
Despite its importance, we don’t discuss the gender of shareholders because the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer
Finance doesn’t track this statistic. They collect data by household, not at the individual level.
2
Direct ownership of stock means that there is a stock certificate issued from a company with the owners name on it. Most
Americans own stock indirectly, mainly through a pension account (46.6 percent of all households) due to the shift from
traditional pensions to individual 401(k) accounts, mutual fund (9.8 percent), or trust funds (3.9 percent) (Wolff 2017). The
advantage that direct shareholders have is that they have more opportunity to benefit from a meteoric rise of specific
companies’ share prices, whereas investing, for example, with an indexed mutual fund means broad market exposure.
There’s less risk, but also less payoff, if a particular company does well.

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 Less than 14 percent of American households own
corporate stock directly.

The numbers are especially stark when we look across race and ethnic lines. In 2007,
corporate stock, financial securities, mutual funds, and personal trusts comprised over
17 percent of the total assets held by white families. For black families, it shrinks to 3.4
percent and decreases to 2.5 percent for Latinx. While 60 percent of white households have
retirement accounts and/or own some stock, only 34 percent of black households and 30
percent of Latinx households do (Wolff 2017).

The working class, particularly people of color, are not only failing to receive the payoffs from
shareholder-first capitalism, they are arguably being disproportionately harmed. There is very
little research connecting shareholder primacy with income and racial inequality, which needs
to be the next step in research on this topic. In the meantime, we can connect a few of the dots.

First, shareholder primacy is creating a more insecure labor market for American
workers in general. One result of the corporate focus on maximizing quarterly returns for
shareholders, for example, is they have cut costs by outsourcing part of their workforce
to third-party businesses—a practice termed the “fissuring of the workplace,” which is
restructuring the labor market to render lower-wage jobs, employment insecurity, less
worker safety, and less comprehensive benefits (Weil 2014; Davis 2016).

Second, people of color are particularly affected by shareholder primacy because of their
disproportionate employment in low-wage, insecure jobs. As laid out in the Roosevelt
Institute’s The Hidden Rules of Race, the racial rules of our economy—discriminatory laws,
policies, institutions, regulations, and social norms, both implicit and explicit—have fostered
the inequities people of color experience as workers, consumers, and small business owners
(Flynn et al. 2017). Shareholder primacy exacerbates these disparities by channeling a larger
percentage of workers overall into tenuous work situations that have long been the domain
of people of color. For workers of color, this work is likely to become even more insecure.

Contrary to popular belief, the stock market has not been democratized. The bulk of
American stockholders are wealthy and white, and the payouts to these shareholders are driving
our wealth divide and impacting American workers, especially individuals and communities
of color, in ways that we are just beginning to understand. In the growing discussion of
shareholder primacy and its consequences, we must work to better expose these connections,
including the hidden rules of race. With a more comprehensive awareness of one of the key
drivers of today’s high-profit, low-wage economy, we can build a movement that dismantles
shareholder primacy and replaces it with an inclusive and fair corporate governance system.

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DIMENSION TWO

The Role of Shareholders

What is it that shareholders do? The mainstream textbook story is that, as owners of
corporations, shareholders both play an important role in finance and they vote on corporate
decisions, particularly regarding board elections. Pieces of this story are true. For example,
some shareholders and fund managers do vote in proxy elections, and, as we discuss in the
Power section, a small minority exert enormous influence over corporate decisions through
their voting and through their direct influence on boards. Yet, the notion that shareholders
are owners of corporations (as though that, on its own, is doing something) is contested
in legal debates. Further, the role of shareholders as essential funders of corporations is
contested empirically. By challenging both of these mainstream assumptions on which
shareholder primacy is buttressed, we argue in this section that the theoretical justifications
for this ideology and system of governance have become extraordinarily thin and that the
outsized power that some shareholders have to influence corporate decisions, based
on this problematic ideology, must be reined in to better match their minimal role in
our corporations.

DO SHAREHOLDERS OWN CORPORATIONS?

Shareholder primacy rests on the fallacy that shareholders are the owners of corporations.
But as Stout and other legal scholars have argued, “Shareholders do not, and cannot, own
corporations. Corporations are independent legal entities that own themselves” (2012).
A company’s shares are what shareholders own, which essentially function as contracts
between the shareholders and the corporations, giving shareholders very limited rights.

As Stout wrote, “Shareholders do not, and cannot,

own corporations. Corporations are independent
legal entities that own themselves.”

A common metaphor for share ownership is a bundle of sticks, in which each stick
represents a particular right. This metaphor is designed to convey that ownership is not
a binary concept; ownership has varying degrees of meaning, and we can possess some
property rights but not others. Examples of ownership rights in the United States include
the right of control or use; the right of benefit (e.g., the right to profit from the property);
the right of transference (i.e., the right to give or sell); the right of destruction; and the right

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of exclusion (e.g., the right to reject access). To meaningfully call something ownership,
someone would need enough ownership characteristics—enough of the sticks in a bundle—
to be a legitimate owner.

If a shareholder owns 50.1 percent of a company’s shares, they arguably have a meaningful
amount of ownership rights. But for most shareholders of America’s public corporations,
who own minute fractions of total shares, they have no right of possession or right of use.
They can’t walk into a corporation and demand an office. They have no influence to sell the
business. They can’t give the company away, and they can’t exclude someone from using
business property or the products and services it sells.

Shareholders also don’t face the liabilities that true ownership would entail. Unlike a
car owner who is at fault for a car crash, shareholders are not responsible for damages
corporations incur on consumers, workers, or society in general. Removing liability is an
underlying purpose of the current corporate legal structure. For some critics, however, that
means that, by definition, large public corporations, as a whole, cannot be owned—even by
shareholders who own 50.1 percent of a company’s shares.

As economic scholar John Kay explains:

“So who does own a company? The answer is that no one does anymore than anyone
owns the river Thames, the National Gallery, the streets of London, or the air we
breathe. There are many different kinds of claims, contracts, and obligations in modern
economics, and only occasionally are these well described by the term ownership.”

Furthermore, while shareholders do rightly own their own shares, there are other corporate
stakeholders who own their own inputs or means of production. As Boston College
Professor of Law Kent Greenfield argues, “bondholders own their bonds, suppliers own
their inventory, and employees ‘own’ their labor.” Each of these owners contributes their
property to the corporation with the expectation of making a return.

The notion of corporate ownership is what so much of shareholder primacy rests on; it is
the reason why executives act to maximize shareholder value. Milton Friedman, the late
Chicago School economist who is often credited with seeding shareholder-first capitalism
in 1970, wrote that “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business [i.e.,
the shareholders]. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to
conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as
much money as possible,” without breaking the law or cheating people (Friedman 1970).

What happens to shareholder primacy when this conception of ownership—on which it rests—
is debunked? Some legal scholars would argue that it doesn’t matter if the logic is disproved,

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it’s too late; shareholder primacy is now legal. Yet, the question of whether or not Delaware
corporate law (where most public corporations in the U.S. are incorporated) actually dictates
that corporations have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value is a contested issue,
and it would be incredibly worthwhile to bring this academic debate up for air.3

THE MYTH OF STOCK MARKET FINANCING

Shareholder-first capitalism is also based on the notion that a fundamental purpose of
shareholders is to provide funds to corporations, a function so essential they merit priority
over all other stakeholders. But as Fox and Lorsch (2012) argue in their article “What Good
are Shareholders?,” it is not that simple. Businesses need funds to invest in growth, but
they typically don’t rely on public shareholders for this financing. Net issuance of corporate
equity, or the sale of new stock, for non-financial companies is historically low. In fact,
between 2007 and 2016, it has been negative at an average of minus $412 billion per year
(Lazonick 2017).

Once a private company has its initial public offering, or IPO, (i.e., gone public), it is less
shareholders than the stock market in general that indirectly serves a funding role. In
other words, the markets are providing the space for shares to be easily bought and sold
(i.e., liquidity) on the secondary market, which reassures corporate lenders, the people
actually doing the financing. According to Fox and Lorsch, “established corporations tend
to finance investments out of retained earnings or borrowed money. They don’t need
shareholders’ cash.” Economist William Lazonick agrees with this argument: “Academic
research on sources of corporate finance shows that, compared with other sources of
funds, stock markets in advanced countries have been insignificant suppliers of capital for
corporations” (2017).

In fact, funding is arguably flowing in the reverse direction, as corporations, through the
practice of stock buybacks, have become huge fund suppliers to the stock market. (See the
“Stock Buybacks: Driving Today’s High-Profit, Low-Wage Economy” section below.) These
wasteful payouts to shareholders are occurring even to the point of borrowing money to do
so, according to Roosevelt Institute Fellow J.W. Mason: “Today, there is a strong correlation
between shareholder payouts and borrowing, a relationship that did not exist before the
mid-1980s” (Mason 2014). The conventional wisdom about shareholders is that they are
essential for funding corporations. Indeed, they are crucial for starting businesses, but they
are increasingly less important for continued productivity and growth.

See The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” series: “Etsy’s I.P.O. and Public Corporations’ Obligations to Shareholders.”
3

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The weaknesses of the two core arguments for shareholder primacy—that shareholders are
owners of corporations and that they are necessary for ongoing corporate financing (unlike
the stock market in general)—suggest that the current way we run our corporations in the
U.S., and the outsized power some shareholders have to sway corporate strategy decisions,
lacks crucial justification. In truth, shareholders of public corporations serve very little
purpose after the IPO, and their power should reflect this minimal role. The next
section on the power dynamics of shareholders provides a path forward to accomplish this.

STOCK BUYBACKS: DRIVING TODAY’S

HIGH-PROFIT, LOW-WAGE ECONOMY
Stock buybacks, or share repurchases, What is especially troubling about the
are a practice in which companies buy practice of buybacks—a growing trend
back their own stock from shareholders, across S&P 500 companies (Imbert
typically on the open market (the 2018)—is that, by choosing to buy back
alternative is through a private exchange publicly held shares, companies are able to
called “tender offers”), to inflate share push up their stock price without actually
prices. When a share of stock is bought investing in the company’s capital, research
back, the company reabsorbs the portion and development, or its workers. In other
of its ownership that was previously words, while corporate profits are high,
distributed among other investors. companies are reallocating their resources
According to economist William Lazonick, away from economic productivity in order
the purported theory behind performing to payoff shareholders. According to
buybacks is that they can offset employee Konczal et al., “Before the 1970s, American
stock options, boost undervalued stock corporations consistently paid out around
prices, or transition a public company 50 percent of their profits to shareholders,
to go private again (Lazonick 2014). But retaining the rest for investment. But over
evidence shows that open-market share the past 30 years, shareholder payouts
repurchases specifically are often used to have averaged 90 percent of reported
manipulate stock prices at the behest of profits” (2015). Most of those payouts come
shareholders who want to play the market, in the form of buybacks.
including executives who know exactly
For more information on stock buybacks
when to exercise their stock options or sell
and how to curb this extractive corporate
their stock based on when their companies
behavior, see the recent issue brief from
are performing buybacks.
economist Lenore Palladino (2018).

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DIMENSION THREE

The Power of Shareholders

Who owns or controls shares is not only important for how wealth is distributed; this also
shapes the distribution of power among shareholders, which matters enormously
for economic outcomes. While shareholders of early joint-stock companies, like Carnegie
Steel, exerted direct power over these companies, today’s disparate share ownership
means most individual, private shareholders don’t have any meaningful governance power.
In their wake, institutional shareholders are the central conduits of share ownership
and governance power, which, because of their own market incentives, is driving today’s
shareholder primacy and short-termism trends.

Institutional investors are organizations that invest on behalf of clients. They come in a
range of forms, from public and private pension funds to university endowments, mutual
funds, and hedge funds. While approximately half (51 percent) of the over 126 million
households in America own corporate stocks, most (47 percent) hold them indirectly
through institutional investors, particularly through their individual pension accounts
(Wolff 2017). Collectively, institutional investors—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street,
the largest—control 80 percent of the S&P 500 index; the dollar value of their control is
approximately $18 trillion (McGrath 2017).

“ACTIVIST” HEDGE FUNDS

To be sure, the most powerful shareholders are “activist” hedge funds, which are akin to the
corporate raiders of the 1980s and are increasingly pressuring corporations to abandon any
existing long-term strategy for a quick boost in share price.4 With just a small percentage of
a company’s shares (6 percent, on average) and relatively brief share ownership (averaging
two years), they push companies to cut costs by laying off workers and selling assets, and
they implore them to use company coffers by buying back stocks to elevate price—which
amounts to insider trading (Park 2016; Brav et al. 2012).

Additionally, many hedge funds pressure companies to sell themselves to their competitors
in order to bump up share prices before they themselves cash out. One report estimates
that hedge funds are driving 25 percent of today’s mergers trend, which is fostering the
increasing concentration of corporate power—the likes of which we have not seen since the
Gilded Age (Toppan Vite 2015).

The term “activist” refers to investors—hedge fund or otherwise—who obtain enough corporate shares in order to garner
4

influence and effect change at a company.

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PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS
While activist hedge funds are explicitly aggressive in their strategies to extract value out of
companies, many other institutional investors, including mutual funds, endowments, and
some pension funds,5 are better characterized as passive-aggressive. Because they manage
such large swaths of the whole stock market, these investors aren’t exerting the same
kind of pressure on any one public corporation, but they are also not pushing back against
extractive corporate practices because they ultimately benefit from the same outcomes.
While many of the individual investors that these organizations represent are in it for
the long haul, institutional investors are incentivized to attract clients by showing them
higher and higher returns. The combination of that short-term motivation of institutional
investors with the enormous power they hold (because they control so much stock) over a
company’s business decisions means that these investors tend to support the usual suite of
self-serving, extractive strategies, including cutting research and development (R&D) and
labor costs, buying back stocks, and selling off assets or even the company.

The combination of the short-term motivation of

institutional investors with the enormous power they
hold over a company’s business decisions means that
these investors tend to support the usual suite of self-
serving, extractive strategies.
One way the outsized power of institutional investors—and their profits—is amplified is
when institutional investors themselves invest with activist hedge funds who can give them
above market returns; partnerships that will only fuel activist campaigns and reinforce the
problematic economic outcomes of shareholder primacy. Yale University’s endowment
has been under fire recently for investing—through four different hedge funds—in Puerto
Rico’s debt (Dayen 2018). State Street Global Advisors, a leading index investor, said that
they are willing to work with activists to achieve their corporate governance goals (i.e., make
money), and investment manager Neuberger Berman recently announced that they bought
a 20 percent stake in JANA Partners, the hedge fund that pressured Whole Foods to sell to
Amazon (Holmberg 2018). According to Dan Romito, writing for Harvard Business Review,
institutional investors increasingly think of investing with activists as “a value-based
strategy that optimizes untapped shareholder wealth” (2015). Indeed, these partnerships
will surely tap new opportunities for shareholder wealth—at the expense of workers,
consumers, the long-term health of companies, and our economy overall.

There are of course exceptions. For example, some public pension funds—like CalPERS, the pension fund for public
5

workers in California—use their power as shareholders to fight extractive pressure on corporations (Webber 2018).

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EXECUTIVE PAY PACKAGES
The passivity of institutional investors—and its own role in driving next-quarter decisions—
is exemplified within executive pay issues, as well. In 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street
Reform and Consumer Protection Act gave shareholders the right to provide a non-binding
vote on executive pay packages as a way to signal shareholder opinion on growing trends
in these exorbitant deals. (See the “Perfomance Pay” section below.) During 2012, only 16
percent of mutual fund families, which owned more than 20 percent of all shares in U.S.
public companies, voted against “Say-on-Pay” proposals, despite the fact that the average
CEO pay for that year was over 14 million (Sabadish and Mishel 2013).

The passivity of institutional investors—and its own

role in driving next-quarter decisions—is exemplified
within executive pay issues, as well.

While the most powerful institutional investors are generally the least likely to resist
high executive pay,6 there are key incentive issues that make the majority of these groups
reluctant to disapprove of exorbitant pay packages. Mutual fund investors, which alone
manage more than 20 percent of shares in U.S. public companies, are managing pension
and 401(k) plans for public corporations and are directly retained by the very executives
whose pay packages they are asked to approve—a clear conflict of interest (Holmberg and
Umbrecht 2014; Stout 2012). Further, because of time and resource constraints, investors
rely heavily on proxy advisor services, particularly Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS)
and Glass Lewis, for voting advice. According to one report, a negative recommendation
from ISS will influence between approximately 14 percent and 21 percent of votes on
managements’ proposals on average (Larcker et al. 2015). The problem is that the services
themselves tend not to provide enough due diligence around shortsighted practices,
including equity-heavy executive pay packages, so they often recommend approving this pay
and thus reinforce the problem.

An American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) report revealed that the largest
6

mutual fund investors—Vanguard, BlackRock, ING, and Lord Abbett—were much less likely to object to management
compensation proposals. Their sheer size, and thus power, means that their voices vastly outweigh the preferences of
the smaller funds, which are much more likely to vote against high pay packages (2011).

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PERFORMANCE PAY
One of the first policies that helped legally does this behavior have on the economy
codify shareholder-first capitalism was at large? Many economists argue that
the performance pay loophole (which was executive stock options dolled out in the
closed without any fanfare in the 2018 financial industry played a meaningful role
Republican tax reform bill). In his 1992 in the mortgage crisis and subsequent
campaign, a key issue for President Bill global financial meltdown. Economists
Clinton was the expanding paychecks involved in the Squam Lake Working
of corporate executives. His idea was to Group on Financial Regulation (2010)
cap deductions for executive pay at $1 argued that the structure of executive
million, which, in 1993, became part of the pay can affect the risk of “systemically
U.S. tax code as Section 162(m). There important” financial institutions. “Because
were, however, a few exceptions made at the owners [...] of financial firms do not
the last minute to this rule; most notably, bear the full cost of their failures, they have
one for executive pay that qualified it as an incentive to take more risk than they
“performance-based,” which, coming in the otherwise would. This, in turn, increases
form of mostly corporate equity, exhibited the chance of bank failures, systemic risk,
what agency theorists mean by aligning and taxpayer costs.” Performance pay also
executive and shareholder interests. diminishes long-term spending because
companies buy back stocks to offset (i.e.,
Once Section 162(m) became law,
pay for) the “dilutive” effects of executive
companies, predictably, started dispensing
stock options on corporate stock prices.
more compensation that qualified as
performance pay, particularly stock A lot of money has moved up to
options. Median executive compensation executives, but everyday Americans got
levels for S&P 500 industrial companies the bill. Beyond the innumerable costs
almost tripled in the 1990s, partly driven by we’ve borne from the recent economic
a dramatic growth in stock options, which crisis, Balsam (2012) calculated that
doubled in frequency. taxpayers have subsidized $30 billion
to corporations between 2007 and
Performance pay can (and has) made
2010 for the performance pay loophole.
executives very wealthy, very quickly—an
According to a 2013 Public Citizen report,
exchange that not only drives economic
the top 20 highest-paid CEOs received
inequality but also creates incentives for
salaries totaling $28 million, but they
shortsighted, excessively high-risk, and
also had deductible performance-based
occasionally fraudulent decisions in order
compensation totaling over $738 million
to boost stock prices. What kind of effect
(Crowther 2013). Assuming a 35 percent

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tax rate, that’s a $235 million unpaid It has not been well publicized that the
tax bill. The Institute for Policy Studies recent Republican tax bill closed the
calculated that between 2011 and 2013, performance pay loophole. It remains to
the CEOs of the top 6 publicly held fast be seen if corporations will pay less in
food chains “pocketed more than $183 corporate equity, particularly stock options,
million in performance pay, lowering their or if (more likely) the toothpaste is out of the
companies’ IRS bills by an estimated $64 tube and equity-heavy pay packages, with
million” (Anderson 2013). their associated problems, are here to stay.

TARGETING SHAREHOLDER POWER IS THE KEY TO

SHAREHOLDER PRIMACY REFORM
Some might argue that, because shareholder primacy began with the bad ideas of a few
economists, the way to address shareholder primacy is to simply replace those ideas by
changing how people think about the corporation. While we agree that reform has to happen
at a cultural level, particularly in the social norms and expectations created within business,
economics, and law departments and classrooms, we must also recognize that shareholder
primacy has been codified by a variety of policies that have reinforced shareholder power. As
such, it is going to take policy reforms to dismantle those powers.

The extractive, value-diminishing effects of shareholder primacy stem from the outsized
power and distorted incentives of institutional investors, particularly activist hedge funds. It
stands to reason, then, that dismantling shareholder primacy to curb these trends will require
structural reforms that target the power and/or the incentives of institutional shareholders.

The extractive, value-diminishing effects of

shareholder primacy stem from the outsized power
and distorted incentives of institutional investors,
particularly activist hedge funds.

In terms of targeting shareholder power, one idea is to build countervailing worker power
with a federal law that requires sizeable representation of workers on the boards of public
corporations. As the German example of this law has demonstrated, putting workers at the
table where issues like executive pay packages and stock buybacks are decided will help
abate these trends (Holmberg 2017). In terms of regulating incentives, Palladino (2018)

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argues that prohibiting open-market stock buybacks is crucial. In addition, taxing capital
gains at the same (or higher) rate as ordinary income would provide lower financial returns
for hedge funds and would help curb skyrocketing executive pay by making stock options
less tax advantageous. More direct solutions include a luxury tax on excessive CEO pay or
a ban on equity pay for executives altogether. This is in no way a comprehensive list, but
simply a few examples to illustrate how to weaken the hold institutional shareholders have
over our public corporations and economy.

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Conclusion
Lynn Stout made a crucial point about shareholder primacy: We can’t dismantle
it without first understanding the complex nature of shareholders and the impact
they have on our economy and society. This report has tried to fill this gap by describing
the three dimensions of shareholders: their identity, role, and power. We first described
shareholder demographic identity, pushing back against the media allegory that the stock
market has been democratized in the U.S. Mostly very wealthy, white households are
benefiting from today’s high-profit, low-wage economy, and workers and low- and middle-
class communities, including communities of color, will continue to not only be left out
but also disproportionately harmed. We then contest mainstream conceptions about
what shareholders do, that corporations are primarily dependent on shareholders for
financing and, as owners, corporations exist for the sole purpose of extracting corporate
value to payoff shareholders. These arguments should be enough to motivate concerned
policymakers to dismantle shareholder primacy. Finally, we addressed how to do this
by peeling back the third layer: shareholder power. Because institutional shareholders,
especially hedge funds, manage and own so much stock, their outsized power over our
economy—and their respective incentives, which reinforce predatory value extraction—
must be combated with policies that target both the power and incentives.

We cannot create good jobs, raise median wages, and, more broadly, address economic
inequality, especially racial inequality, without replacing shareholder primacy with a better
system of rules that shape corporate behavior. Only then can we build an innovative and fair
economy that is truly inclusive of all stakeholders, especially workers.

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