국민연금의 스튜어드십 활동

Abstract

The rise of institutional investors has led to increased concentration of equity ownership, with most public corporations now having a substantial proportion of their shares held by a small number of institutional investors. At the same time, these institutions are controlled by investment managers, which have their own agency problems to their own beneficial investors. In stewardship activity, several factors of agency problems are there that afflict the decisions of investment managers of either passive index funds, active mutual funds, or both. First, such investment managers generally capture only a small fraction of the benefits that results from their stewardship activities while bearing the full cost of such activities. Further, competition with other investment managers is typically insufficient to eliminate these agency problems. Finally, investment managers may be further influenced by private incentives, such as their interest in obtaining business from corporations, that encourage them to side excessively with managers of corporations. Activist hedge funds have substantially better incentives than managers of index funds or active mutual funds. They have high powered incentives to increase value, limited business from portfolio companies, concentrated positions and stronger incentives regarding relative performance. But, they have also limit in doing stewardship activities. Activist hedge fund managers have incentives to spend on stewardship only when the governance-generated value increases likely to result are especially large. It is also needed that other institutional investors are willing to support the changes sought by the activist hedge fund manager. Last July 30, National Fund adopted ‘Stewardship Code’ in order to strengthen the shareholders right. But, there are still criticism that it can bring the communism of the fund at the corporate market, because national fund belong to the government of political power. Beside that, they also bring the problems that they can infringe the autonomous of management and ask excessive dividends, not be fully independent from the government, induce downside the earning rate, rack of speciality to active, etc. With stewardship activity, it is most important that how they use their voting right. Because they should correspond to many shareholders meeting of the corporations they invested, institutional investors can’t employ members and burden the fee for voting at the shareholders meeting, Many institutional investors employ the services of proxy advisors to analyze the management and receive voting recommendations on exercising their voting right. So, the roll of proxy advisors like ISS(Institutional Shareholder Service) and CGS(Corporate Governance Service) will be increasingly important at voting right. But, the monopoly of proxy advisory market by the big advisory company brought severe unreliablity to that advise activities, So, it needs to be regulated by the law in order to maintain the justice of advisory market. To strengthen activity of stewardship by the national fund could bring the strengthening the minority shareholders right and the blocking the discretion of owner. But, that is possible only on the basis of assumption that the independence of national fund is secured from the government. So, it is key issues to confirm the independence from the political power when forming the organization. There are some worries about national fund’s stewardship activities that they will focus on short term benefit at the sacrifice of the long term benefit. There are also expectation they will protect corporations from the attack of the active hedge fund by adopting the stewardship code of national fund. The possibility of casting voting roll of national fund at the shareholders meeting are increased. So, they should carry out the roll of protector of the domestic corporate from the raid of plunder hedge fund to seek short term gain.