We investigate whether business ties with portfolio firms influence mutual funds' proxy voting using a comprehensive data set spanning 2003 to 2011. In contrast to prior literature, we find that business ties significantly influence pro-management voting at the level of individual pairs of fund...

This paper compares the extent of common ownership in the US and the EU stock markets, with a particular focus on differences in the applicable ownership transparency requirements. Most empirical research on common ownership to date has focused on US issuers, largely relying on ownership data...

This paper examines mutual fund families' proxy voting records to analyze their choices between voting against management (“voice”) and voting with their feet (“exit”). Even though proxy voting is particularly conducive to governance through voice rather than exit, we provide evidence...

Debtholder stewardship refers to the involvement of corporate creditors in a firm’s governance framework with the aim of improving corporate decision-making. This article develops the theory of debtholder stewardship by identifying the mechanisms of debtholder influence, assessing their...

Agency conflicts can arise when a fund manager also chairs the board of the fund. We examine the consequences of this fund manager duality using a broad sample of single managed US equity funds. We find that duality managers significantly underperform non-duality managers. This underperformance...

Some investment advisors offer multiple versions of a fund with the same manager and highly correlated returns. But these twinʺ funds are separate portfolios for different investors with differing abilities to select and monitor managers. Using a matched sample of retail and institutional twin...

We analyze whether the growing importance of passive investors has influenced the campaigns, tactics, and successes of activists. We find activists are more likely to seek board representation when a larger share of the target company's stock is held by passively managed mutual funds....

I study the effect of mutual funds’ securities lending activities on their participation in proxy voting using hand-collected fund securities lending data. Consistent with Shleifer and Vishny’s (1986) argument that a shareholder’s willingness to monitor a firm decreases as the cost of...

In recent decades, investors have wielded their voting power to influence the direction of corporate policy. Although mutual funds have widely varying voting patterns and predictable ideological disagreements, little is known about whether their underlying investors have similar preferences. I...

Pichhadze (2010) introduced the Market Oriented Blockholder Model (MOBM) as properly describing the ownership pattern in the American equity markets. Under the model, the emerging blockholder in the American equity markets is the institutional investor (II). This poses a challenge to the...