Mutual funds are significant blockholders in many corporations. Concerns that funds vote in a pro management manner to garner lucrative pensions contracts led the SEC to mandate the disclosure of proxy votes. We present a model of mutual fund voting in the presence of potential business ties. We...

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...