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that a business tie increases by 11.6% the probability that a fund family votes with management. Regarding the ISS favorable shareholder proposals in column (3) of Table 5, the probability that the fund family supports management by voting against shareholder sponsored proposals is increased by 4.3% when a business tie exists. As discussed in the previous section, the ISS favorable shareholder proposals are comparable to the ISS unfavorable management proposals given that the disparity in voting decisions between management and shareholders is large. Therefore, it is expected that management puts exerts more effort to achieve a victory through pressuring mutual funds that manage its pension plans.

Although the table is not included due to inconclusive results, I provide conditional logit analysis as including fund family fixed effect to investigate whether there is a difference between voting support by fund families at their client firms versus non-client firms. Contrary to my expectation that narrowing down the sample to close votes where the marginal effects of voting shift is large would allow me to examine different voting behavior of mutual funds for their client firms and for non-client firms, I find no difference in voting support of mutual funds across the two groups. This indicates the probability that mutual funds that manage retirement assets vote with management of their client firms is similar to the probability that those mutual funds vote with management of their non-client firms. This result is consistent with the previous findings on mutual fund voting behaviors.

As argued above, there is a non-trivial divergence in fund votes within the same families. It is likely that an individual fund has stronger incentive to support management if the fund is one of the pension investment options of the firm in which it invests, compared to other funds in the same families that are not included as investment options. Therefore, I expect the influence of pension ties to be stronger when there is divergence within fund families. To test this, in Table 6 I analyze the subsample with the proposals voted by mutual funds which have divergence within fund families. When there is disparity in fund votes on the ISS favorable management proposals, I find no relation between pension ties and voting support of fund families. However, for the ISS unfavorable management proposal, a pension tie increases the probability that a fund family votes with management by 43.3%. Compared to Table 5, the marginal effect of pension ties is four times greater if there is a disparity in fund voting. Similarly, the marginal effect of pension ties becomes four times stronger when fund families do not uniformly vote for the ISS favorable shareholder proposals.

4.2 Analysis at fund level

As shown in Table 7, some funds vote uniformly with other funds in the same family while other funds vote in a diverse fashion. Although most of the previous literature argues that funds within the same family tend to vote uniformly, the evidence in Table 1 suggests that mutual fund voting should be analyzed at the individual fund level rather than at the fund family level. To investigate how support of individual funds toward management in proxy voting is influenced by business ties, I use a probit model. Due to limited observation availability, I can only test for the ISS favorable shareholder sponsored proposal. To