Funding has been sought for the first stage of a research project aiming to shed light on investor stewardship's expectations gap. The project examines how institutional shareholders perceive their shareholder-stewardship-derived responsibilities vis-à-vis engagement practices. This can help appreciate the expectations gap’s severity from the perspective of engagement practices and draw testable hypotheses about its causes.
The project is timely as the Financial Reporting Council (“FRC”) revised the 2020 Stewardship Code. The project aspires to provide findings that can prove insightful for the FRC in crafting its policy and regulation and contribute empirically to academic discussions about shareholder stewardship, thus advancing the literature.
The project’s originality lies in being the first study to explore the expectations gap as an issue per se. Previous literature has criticised shareholder stewardship and related regulation on various grounds. Empirical studies have examined some of those grounds, but not the expectations gap. Only one study focuses on shareholders’ perceptions about shareholder stewardship. Despite acknowledging it, the study does not address the expectations gap.