Customers as Friendly Shareholders: Uncovering the Complex Mutual Fund-Broker Relationship

The authors have benefited from comments and suggestions from Victoria Ivashina (the editor), two anonymous referees, Vikas Agarwal, Diane Del Guercio, Steve Dimmock, Richard Evans, Mark Flannery, Umit Gurun, Chris James, Tao Li, Andy Naranjo, Veronika Pool, Jonathan Reuter, Jay Ritter, Chester Spatt, and conference and seminar participants at the 2021 WFA Annual Meeting, Deakin University, Indian School of Business, the Office of Financial Research, National University of Singapore, University of Florida, and Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. The authors thank Jay Ritter for sharing the IPO data and Haibei Zhao and Ke Shen for help with matching data in Form N-SAR to the CRSP mutual fund database. The authors also thank Kyle Cooper, Amy Dunn, Boyuan Li, Hongcheng Ruan, and Mingyin Zhu for excellent research assistance.