Large pension funds and the corporate governance practices of Brazilian companies

Abstract

We do not find any consistent evidence that the presence of the largest Brazilian pension funds as relevant shareholders is associated to higher corporate governance scores by public Brazilian companies. Even though companies with institutional investors as relevant shareholders presented a higher average corporate governance score than other companies, they were also larger and had greater past profitability than other companies, which are common attributes of firms with better corporate governance according to the literature. The impact of Brazilian institutional investors on the corporate governance quality of their investees is either negligible or cannot be captured by the proxies we employed. Finally, we note that these two pension funds may represent the policy and political views of the incumbent Brazilian government and that the actions of their board appointees may or not reflect what is understood as good corporate governance practices.