We employ a new comprehensive proxy voting records database to investigate whether mutual funds consider prior firm performance when they vote on a diverse range of management- and shareholder-sponsored proposals relating to governance, compensation, and director election. We argue that prior...

This paper provides the first evidence that the quality of fund stewardship matters to fund style drift. Based on 435 equity funds from 2008 to 2011, we find a negative association between overall stewardship and the holding-based measure of style consistency and style dispersion in the size...

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Jones v. Harris Associates L.P. has highlighted the potential for agency conflicts in mutual funds, whose advisors have the de facto power to award themselves high fees. While the surrounding debate has focused on the extent to which market competition...

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 paper addresses the questions whether European mutual fund managers rely on sell-side analyst information with respect to their investment decisions and whether this behavior impacts fund performance. Based on a sample of over 4,300 European mutual funds and around 1.2 million portfolio...

This paper analyzes exit strategies of buyout funds in their portfolio companies following Initial Public Offerings. We use a data set of 222 buyout-backed IPOs in the United States between 1999 and 2008 including hand-collected data about each exit process to draw up a detailed road map of...

In the maturing Private Equity industry, investments where the Private Equity fund owns a minority of the equity – as a different form of investment – are gaining influence. Those minority investments use different instruments for value creation than classic majority investments and involve...

The same fund family may sponsor both passive and active funds. Due to the funds' different fee structures and flow sensitivity to performance, this may create conflicts of interest at the fund family level. Using portfolio firms' mergers and acquisitions as a laboratory, I show that fund...

We construct measures of mutual fund uniqueness using cluster analysis of fund returns. We find that fund uniqueness persists over time, and is higher for more actively managed funds. More unique funds charge higher fees, but they do not deliver better net-of-fee performance. Fund uniqueness...