A new paper by Brad Barber of US Davis reports that shareholder activism by CALPERS (the main California public employee pension fund and the largest pension fund in the US) "has resulted in total wealth creation of $3.1 billion between 1992 and 2005." To put that figure into perspective, that's about $240 million per year. Which is just 0.1% of CalPERS $211.1 billion assets under management. Of course, more is better than less, I suppose. Still, it suggests that shareholder activism is not the investor panacea some claim. So I stand by the case against shareholder activism I made at length, inter alia, in The Case for Limited Shareholder Voting Rights and, in brief, in Pension Funds Play Politics.