Jan Fichtner

• Dr. phil.
• Senior Researcher at Witten/Herdecke University

Since the Paris Agreement, interest in decarbonization and sustainable finance has grown rapidly. Within the prevalent derisking regime, investment for decarbonization must come predominantly from the private sector. However, growth in ‘sustainable finance’ assets is not necessarily causing more sustainability-advancing productive investment to dri...

Various kinds of sustainable finance have grown rapidly after the 2015 Paris Agreement. But whether this allegedly ‘sustainable’ way of investing can actually fulfil the crucial task of facilitating the mitigation of climate change depends very much on the concrete business schemes and investment practices that are adopted. This chapter conceptuali...

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds are among the fastest‐growing investment styles. ESG investing thereby has a governing effect, and a key open question is whether ESG merely reduces risks for investors or whether it can have a sustainability impact and actively contribute to climate transition. This governance through ESG is charac...

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) funds are among the fastest growing investment styles. ESG funds can be used either to only mitigate risk (input ESG) or to go beyond that to create impact (output ESG). We argue that the governance by ESG is characterised by three potential transmission mechanisms: ratings, shareholder engagement and capi...

Existing studies have scrutinized the rise of states as global owners and investors, yet we still lack a good understanding of what state investment does in a globalized economy, especially in host states. Comparative capitalisms research has analyzed foreign state investment as a potential source of patient capital for coordinated and mixed-market...

Global “tipping elements” such as large forest biomes are critical for climate stability, and are key resource pools for extractive industries – typically, forestry and farming. In recent years the largest global asset managers have begun promoting sustainability policies among their portfolio companies, while evidence suggests that financial insti...

Existing studies have scrutinized the rise of states as global owners and investors, yet we still lack a good understanding of what state investment does in a globalized economy, especially in host states. Comparative capitalisms research has analyzed foreign state investment as a potential source of patient capital for coordinated and mixed-market...

Since the financial crisis there has been a massive shift from actively managed funds to passive funds that merely replicate financial indexes. Instead of active investors influencing states through their investment decisions, in this new economic reality the locus of agency is shifting from investors towards index providers as they decide which co...

What is the role of (corporate) networks in International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship? Throughout its young history, the field has developed different conceptual and empirical approaches to answer this question. At the same time, corporate networks are still underappreciated as fora for political and economic change. This chapter argues tha...

Fundamental change is happening in global finance – the shift from active management to index funds. This money mass-migration into index funds has far-reaching socio-economic consequences, as it has the potential to transform the nature of shareholder capitalism. We call BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street the ‘New Permanent Universal Owners’ tha...

Fundamental change is happening in global finance – the shift from active management to index funds. This money mass-migration into index funds has far-reaching socio-economic consequences, as it has the potential to transform the nature of shareholder capitalism. We call BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street the ‘New Permanent Universal Owners’ th...

Since the 1980s, institutional investors have increased their assets under management enormously. This trend has been driven both by rapidly growing equity markets and by the fact that households increasingly shifted from direct stock ownership to holdings via asset managers. Moreover, institutional investors benefited from the development that man...

Since the global financial crisis, there is a massive shift of assets towards index funds. Rather than picking stocks, index funds replicate stock indices such as the S&P 500. But where do these indices actually come from? This paper analyzes the politico-economic role of index providers, a small group of highly profitable firms including MSCI, S&P...

During the last decades, institutional investors gained an ever more important position as managers of assets and owners of corporations. By demanding (short-term) shareholder value, some of them have driven the financialization of corporations and of the financial sector itself. This chapter first characterizes the specific roles that private equi...

An earlier version of the Supplementary Information was mistakenly uploaded when this Perspective was published, and was live until 14 August 2018, when the correct version was uploaded.

The release of classified documents in the past years have offered a rare glimpse into the opaque world of tax havens and their role in the global economy. Although the political, economic and social implications related to these financial secrecy jurisdictions are known, their role in supporting economic activities with potentially detrimental env...

This is a blogpost for The Conversation UK. For the full text, please follow the link: https://theconversation.com/who-is-more-powerful-states-or-corporations-99616

Fundamental change is happening in asset management – the shift from actively managed funds to index funds. This money mass migration into index funds has far-reaching consequences, because it leads to a concentration of corporate ownership in the hands of the ‘Big Three’ asset managers. We call BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street the ‘New Perman...

Over 25 years ago, Susan Strange urged IR scholars to include multinational corporations in their analysis. Within IR and IPE discussions, this was either mostly ignored or reflected in an empirically and methodologically unsatisfactory way. We reiterate Strange’s call by sketching a fine-grained theoretical and empirical approach that includes bot...

Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active toward passive investment strategies. The passive index fund industry is dominated by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which we call the “Big Three.” We comprehensively map the ownership of the Big Three in the United States and find that together they constitute the largest shareholder in...

Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient regulation, but are increasingly under scrutiny, for instance for enabling tax avoidance. Therefore, the identification of OFC...

Multinational corporations use highly complex structures of parents and subsidiaries to organize their operations and ownership. Offshore Financial Centers (OFCs) facilitate these structures through low taxation and lenient regulation, but are increasingly under scrutiny, for instance for enabling tax avoidance. Therefore, the identification of OFC...

The Cayman Islands is a key node in contemporary global finance, yet it is severely under-researched. This paper compiles the first ‘anatomy’ of the Cayman offshore financial center (OFC), utilizing all sources of publicly available data about the three main segments: banking, direct investment, and portfolio investment. The analysis is performed b...

This blog post discusses existing research on the still rather opaque topic of offshore finance. Subsequently, it is outlined how the CORPNET team is going to shed some new light on this crucial topic by analyzing transnational ownership ties of multinational corporations utilizing complex networks methods and the 'big data' provided by the Orbis d...

The prediction of America’s decline is a regularly recurring phenomenon; this also pertains to the pivotal field of global finance. This paper argues that, first, we have to consider the United States together with the other Anglophone countries. The English-speaking countries and territories – Anglo-America – have deep common political and socio-e...

The English-speaking countries and territories – the Anglosphere – have deep common political and socioeconomic roots. In this blog post I argue that in finance, New York and London (NY-LON) constitute the decision-making core of this transnational formation. Based on the analysis of nine key segments of global finance I find that the Anglosphere c...

Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active towards passive investment strategies. This burgeoning passive index fund industry is dominated by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which we call the ‘Big Three’. This paper is the first to comprehensively map the ownership of the Big Three in the United States. We find that already in 40 p...

This paper presents the Offshore-Intensity Ratio – a simple and straightforward way to identify which countries and jurisdictions could be seen as offshore financial centres (OFCs). By setting the aggregated amount of external capital booked in a jurisdiction in relation to the size of its domestic economy, we get a ratio that expresses the strengt...

An ownership structure dominated by blockholdings is central for ‘Rhenish’ capitalism, because it provides ‘patient capital’. Analysis of the 160 largest listed German corporations shows that blockholdings have declined and foreign investors have increased. This could enable activist hedge funds - ‘impatient capital’ demanding high returns - to hav...

This paper presents the Offshore-Intensity Ratio – a simple and straightforward way to identify which countries and jurisdictions could be seen as offshore financial centres (OFCs). By setting the aggregated amount of external capital booked in a jurisdiction in relation to the size of its domestic economy, we get a ratio that expresses the strengt...

Die Diskussion über Finanzialisierung – verstanden als die zunehmende Dominanz des Finanzsektors, der Finanzmärkte sowie von Finanzmotiven und Finanzeliten (Epstein 2005) – hat sich bislang erstaunlich wenig mit der Rolle einzelner Staaten für die Ausbreitung und Intensivierung dieses Phänomens beschäftigt. Viele Beiträge behandeln Finanzialisierun...

This article argues that a nexus exists between private profit-orienteded actors (privateers and hedge funds) — being only lightly regulated by their home countries (Britain and America) — and ‘offshore’ territories located in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon world. This article argues that the ultimate reason for this nexus is the co...

Jan Fichtner and Benjamin D. Hennig chart the size of the foreign assets in the world's largest offshore financial centres.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine in which ways hedge funds contribute to financialization. Design/methodology/approach – Two already identified conduits through which financialization operates are applied to hedge funds. Findings – The paper finds that hedge funds drive the phenomenon of financialization in two major ways, i.e. t...

The rise of hedge funds from the almost unnoticed beginnings in the late 1940s to the pinnacle of global finance seventy years later is one of the most pivotal developments for the international political economy. It is the central thesis of this paper that the rise of hedge funds can only be explained by the notion of inequality: inequality betwee...

I thank the Hans-Böckler-Foundation for financial support and for granting me access to its archive covering the operations of private equity and activist hedge funds in Germany. 1 The recent volatility in global capital markets should give pause to those who say German leaders, who have been arguing for greater transparency in global hedge funds,...