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Data on pension plans comes from the Form 5500 filings filed with the Department of Labor (DOL) and Internal Revenue Code and 11-K filings filed with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Form 5500 is required to be annually filed by plan administrators in order to report financial, investment, and operational information about pension and welfare benefit plans. The Form 5500 provides information on the fees paid to the service providers such as trustees and recordkeepers as well as the amount of assets held by investment providers. Although the Form 5500 covers most of the sample firms receiving proposals, the data is not as complete as the 11-K. The 11-K is an annual report dealing with employee stock purchases and savings plans which is required to be filed if a company's stock is offered as one of the investment options for plan participants. The 11-K filings include the identity of the trustee, total assets invested in the plan, and the proportion invested in each investment option.

The analysis of this study first examines 354 firms that all have at least one corporate governance related proposal that has 40% to 60% of voting support. The percentage of votes in favor of a proposal is differently computed according to the denominator of the calculation of both support level and the required threshold for each proposal. [6] For each firm in the initial sample, I gather pension data from both the Form 5500 and the 11-K by mapping the IRS Employer Identification Number (EIN) into CUSIP using the CRSP/Compustat Merged Database. Including firms with either the Form 5500 or the 11-K leaves me with 257 firms. [7] As my interest of in this study is whether mutual funds with business ties affect how mutual funds vote, by looking at the fund name and the family name. I check each sample firm to see whether the fund family of the individual fund that casts its vote is the trustee or the service provider for the firm's pension plans and whether the individual fund is included as one of the pension investment options of the plans. Following Ashraf et al. (2010), I classify fund families in the sample sample as having a pension business tie if the fund family is a trustee or service provider or if the individual fund is included among one of the investment options of the plans offered by a firm. The final step is to gather additional information about sample firms: the data on firm characteristics are from CRSP and Compustat; the data on governance index (G-index) is available freely from Metrick's web-site; the data on institutional holdings is obtained from the Thomson-Reuters 13F database.

The final sample of this study is constituted of 257 firms with close votes. As some firms have more than one proposal, 172 management sponsored proposals and 129 shareholder sponsored proposals are collected over the sample period from June 2003 to December 2005. The analysis at the fund family includes 13,120 voting decisions by 101 mutual fund families, and 41,407 fund voting outcomes on ISS favorable shareholder proposals are analyzed at fund level.

3.2 Summary sStatistics

Table 1 provides information on the number of proposals and the number of mutual fund families that cast their votes for each type as well as information on how uniformly funds within the same family vote with management for each proposal type. Voting with management is equivalent to funds voting in favor