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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2023
Do asset managers engage in friendly investing to obtain privileged investment information? We test this hypothesis in the context of mutual fund connections to financial groups. Using brokers as the source of connections, we find that funds overweight the stock of connected financial groups and side with management in contested votes. We also find that fund performance improves with the extent of friendly investing. The improvement stems from trading the stock of companies that borrow from connected financial groups. Brokerage commissions do not drive the results. Our findings suggest that funds can obtain valuable information by acting as friendly shareholders.
For comments and suggestions, we thank an anonymous referee, Vikas Agarwal, Hendrik Bessembinder (the editor), Martijn Boons, Shane Corwin, Zhi Da, Miguel Ferreira, Xin Liu, Melissa Prado, participants at the 2021 MARC conference and the 2021 EFA conference, and seminar participants at NOVA SBE and the University of Notre Dame.