Who owns and controls global capital? Uneven geographies of asset manager capitalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 1980s, U.S. finance has grown disproportionately in power and influence as American investment funds have become the largest shareholders of U.S. corporations, managing tens of trillions of dollars in investments. This paper provides a novel empirical analysis of the ascent of asset manager capitalism in the United States and explores the extent of its global spread by examining the SEC Form 13F filings of U.S. institutional investors along with an extensive global corporate ownership dataset provided by Orbis. This paper finds that U.S. finance owns approximately 60% of U.S. listed companies (an increase from 3% in 1945) and 28% of the equity of all globally listed firms. As the largest global shareholders and the exemplars of U.S. asset managers, the Big Three hold investments in 81% of U.S. listed companies and own 17% of the U.S. equity market, while also appearing as a shareholder in 20% of non-U.S. listed companies and owning 4% of the non-U.S. equity market. This paper illustrates that the ascent of the age of passive investment and universal ownership, exemplified by the activities of the Big Three, has produced a sectorally and geographically uneven landscape of capital flows, exacerbating the existing divides between the heartlands and hinterlands of global financial markets. With the ownership of listed companies being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of increasingly powerful funds, this paper ultimately argues that it is in the ownership of the majority of global capital that the power of modern finance lies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".