Three essays on the rise of sovereign wealth funds.

Summary While SWFs are not new, their number and financial power have grown steadily since the early 2000s, raising many concerns, particularly in developed countries. Are SWFs driven by the same motivations as institutional investors? Does their financial power risk destabilizing markets? These questions have made SWFs a research topic in its own right, and this research paper is part of it. The first essay of this thesis contributes to identify the main factors that may lead a country to create a SWF. Furthermore, the investment strategies of SWFs raise many questions: do they pursue a financial return objective or do they have more strategic objectives? The second essay highlights the complexity of SWFs' decision-making process by testing whether they prefer to invest in countries they are familiar with and/or in countries they have invested in before. Following this analysis, the third essay focuses more specifically on the determinants of SWFs' majority shareholdings by focusing on a particularly active group of funds: the funds of the Gulf States. More precisely, this analysis aims to identify the factors that influence the decision to take control in a given company.