Mutual fund families increasingly hold bonds and stocks from the same firm. We study the implications of such dual holdings for corporate governance and firm decision-making. We present evidence that dual ownership allows financially distressed firms to increase investments and to refinance by...

We study the decisions and performance of managers who are also chair of the board (duality managers). We hypothesize that duality managers take more risky decisions and deliver worse performance than non-duality managers due to reduced level of control and replacement risk. Using the mutual...

This is the first comprehensive study of mutual fund voting in proxy contests. Mutual funds tend to vote for dissident nominees at firms with weak operating and financial performance, and when dissidents are hedge funds. Notably, passive funds are more likely to support incumbent management than...

Proxy advisory firms and large passive mutual funds have faced criticism both for being too powerful and not exercising diligence in proxy voting. We document that the ``Big 3'' passive fund families, Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard, are increasingly likely to vote with management, and...

Recently, several academic theories have expressed concern over the growth of index funds. Some have argued that the growth of index funds will afford the asset managers who provide them too much influence over the public companies they invest in, through increased voting power and engagement...

I propose a novel mechanism that explains why index funds may have a beneficial effect on corporate governance. Mutual fund families centralize voting decisions and may have incentives to monitor even when their individual index funds do not. The presence of index funds strengthens the voice...

Do institutional investors engage with companies on corporate externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions? And if so, why? We study voting at shareholder meetings by two emblematic global investors: BlackRock, a major asset manager, and the Norway Fund, a responsible sovereign wealth fund....

We examine the governance role of delegated portfolio managers. In our model, investors decide how to allocate their wealth between passive funds, active funds, and private savings, and asset management fees are endogenously determined. Funds' ownership stakes and asset management fees determine...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...