Live Poster Session: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/97936875715?pwd=and5K2FXZDErVU9zODMzb25oZEVMQT09
Thursday, July 29th 1:45-2:45pm EDT
Abstract:
Mutual funds own roughly one third of all U.S. equities, which gives them large say over the governance of publicly traded corporations. A board of directors advises and monitors the management of each mutual fund; often one board is responsible for multiple funds managed by a single sponsor (Vanguard, Blackrock, etc.). Directors commonly serve on additional boards, including other mutual funds and/or corporations. This can result in directors who have fiduciary responsibilities to various groups of shareholders. Comprehensive data about mutual fund board membership is publicly available in mandatory N-CSR filings which
are archived by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system. Data on 601 actively managed equity funds belonging to the 25 largest fund families in 2008-2020 will be analyzed, focusing on how a director’s historic and current board memberships affect the performance of their fund and/or firm. A text scraping/web crawler program extracts information about these funds from the N-CSR forms. The extracts contain extraneous information about directors and managing officers, alike, and are not in a standardized format. In order to navigate the aforementioned obstacles and only include members with voting power, the data must be manually cleaned to create a large dataframe of mutual fund boards. This task is the focus of our Summer 2021 efforts. This data will enable research into mutual fund governance using a dataset that is larger and more complete than all other existing and available datasets of mutual fund board membership. This will advance the understanding of mutual fund and corporate governance, which may in turn lead to better governance practices that are beneficial to shareholders, markets, and the economy.