Corporate Sustainability and the Role of Institutional Shareholders: Features, Behaviours and Challenges

Faced with the institutionalization of the ownership of listed companies, it is worth to ask whether institutional shareholders can pursue a sustainable corporate governance and how EU securities regulation can foster this role. However, institutional shareholders act on behalf of their beneficiaries, that are ultimately bearing the financial results of the corporate management. Therefore an agency-cost problem arises. Moreover, institutional shareholders include a variety of financial intermediaries having different relationship with their beneficiaries. On these premises, the presentation aims to provide a synthetic but comprehensive view of how different investment strategies and behaviors of institutional investors cam ameliorate the quality of corporate decisions. It is crucial to investigate the role of self-regulation and that of EU securities regulation (particularly the Sustainable Financial Disclosure Regulation, the Taxonomy Regulation and the overhaul of MiFID II) in coping with the principal-agent relationship's problem ad curbing greenwashing.