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March 10, 2005
Biting the Hand That Feeds: Mutual Fund Ties to Corporate Clients Can Affect Proxy Voting
by William Baue
Study reveals that individual mutual fund firms do not alter proxy voting whether companies are
clients or non-clients, but fund firms with more clients tend to vote and adopt voting policies
favoring management.
SocialFunds.com --
"There is no correlation between how we vote [on proxy resolutions] with respect to whether someone
is a 401 (k) client or not," a Fidelity
spokeswoman told New York Times
reporter Gretchen Morgenson for a September 2004 article. However, Vanguard founder John Bogle confirmed such conflicts of
interest, stating "votes against management may jeopardize the retention of clients of 401 (k) and
pension accounts" in his letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on proxy voting disclosure.
 Which is true--do mutual funds really
vote blindly, or do they lean toward management in hopes of attracting or retaining corporate
pension plan business?
Both, according to a new study entitled Would Mutual
Funds Bite the Hand that Feeds Them? Business Ties and Proxy Voting from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Thanks to the new SEC disclosure rules, Professors Jerry Davis and Han Kim
were able to examine the proxy voting records of 21 mutual fund firms, including Fidelity,
Vanguard, and Putnam (which have over 30
corporate clients) as well as Janus, Oppenheimer, and Franklin (which have under 10). The research focuses
on resolutions addressing corporate governance issues empirically linked to shareowner value in a
2004 study
by Harvard Professor Lucian Bebchuk, such as staggered boards, poison pills, and golden parachutes.
"Our results show that, while potential conflicts of interest exist, there is no sign that
proxy voting depends on whether a firm is a client or not," the authors state in the report. "In
this regard, mutual funds come up clean."
Interestingly, these findings do not necessarily
surprise the researchers. After all, the votes were cast for the first time under the microscope
of public scrutiny and in the shadow of the mutual fund scandals. It is to be expected that mutual
funds would go to lengths to avoid the appearance of nepotistic conflicts of interest, they
contend.
While the researchers did not find differences between client and non-client
voting within fund families, they did find differences when they stepped back to compare fund firms
with more clients to those with less.
"In actual aggregate votes, the more clients and
business ties fund families have, the more they tend to vote against shareholder proposals," Prof.
Kim told SocialFunds.com.
For example, Fidelity voted in favor of the shareowner
resolutions studied only 33 percent of the time, with Putnam and Vanguard supporting them 47 and 51
percent of the time, respectively. Fund firms with less than 10 clients supported shareowner
resolutions more frequently: Oppenheimer 53 percent of the time, Janus 74 percent, and Franklin 78
percent. However, confounding these findings are a set of fund firms with more than 30 clients
that also tend to support shareowner resolutions: AIM/Invesco 54 percent, T. Rowe Price 67 percent, and American Funds 70 percent.
Taking
another step back to examine the policies guiding proxy voting, the researchers found that mutual
fund firms with more clients tend to adopt proxy voting policies which allow them to vote with
management more often than fund firms with fewer clients.
"At the policy level, we find a
positive relation between the volume of pension business a fund company does and its propensity to
vote with management," Profs. Davis and Kim write. "Mutual funds may have to bite some feeding
hands in order to appear even-handed, yet they also have incentives to create policies that lead to
less hand-biting."
"These incentives are greater the more feeding hands there are for a
mutual fund company," they add.
According to the authors, all mutual fund firms must adopt
proxy-voting policies that appear aligned with shareowner interests. Fund firms with significant
income from offering their portfolios through corporate pension plans, however, tend to craft proxy
voting policies that minimize the incidence of voting against management. Conversely, fund
companies with fewer contracts for corporate pension plans are freer to flaunt management interests
by adopting policies more singularly focused on enhancing shareowner value.
Profs. Davis
and Kim conclude by extrapolating the implications of their research.
"Our findings
concerning the relation between business ties and aggregate voting at the family level have
important implications for shareholder activists who want to make mutual funds more responsive to
shareholder value in their proxy voting," write the authors. "They should not be too concerned
with whether funds vote differently between clients and non-clients."
"If there was any
such discriminatory voting behavior, the SEC's newly adopted regulation on proxy voting disclosure
took care of it," they continue. "Instead, they should focus at the fund company level on voting
policies and guidelines that lead to different aggregate voting outcomes."
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SRI World Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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