Sovereign Wealth Funds in Theory and Practice

The Investment Strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds

This paper examines the direct private equity investment strategies across sovereign wealth funds and their relationship to the funds’ organizational structures. SWFs seem to engage in a form of trend chasing, since they are more likely to invest at home when domestic equity prices are higher, and invest abroad when foreign prices are higher. Funds see the industry P/E ratios of their home inve...

The Investment Strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds

Sovereign wealth funds in the mutation of global finance

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) started making the headlines in the midst of the global financial crisis. They were welcomed neither by academics nor by politicians of Western countries. In a flurry of 2008 papers SWF were peremptorily told what they should and shouldn’t do. The reasoning underlying the prescriptive norms was flawed in two respects. First it simply equated SWFs to other instituti...

Political Capitalism and the Rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds

Sovereign wealth funds are neither novel nor constitute any decisive shift towards state control. States and markets are co-constitutive, but states have power precisely because of their ability to define property rights and thus draw the boundary between public and private activity. The way they draw that boundary determines the nature of capitalism in any specific market. ‘Sovereign wealth fu...

Developing Asia’s Sovereign Wealth Funds and Outward Foreign Direct Investment

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have emerged in developing Asia as a policy response to an unprecedented accumulation of foreign exchange (FX) reserves since 2000. At the same time, developing countries have become an increasingly important source of outward foreign direct investment (FDI). The central objective of this paper is to evaluate the prospects for SWFs to serve as a major conduit for t...