Italian asset management companies: governance structure and mutual funds

This paper investigates corporate governance of Italian asset management companies (AMCs) by observing a sample of banking and independent AMCs in 2012. Asset management is a very important sector of the Italian financial system, so its corporate governance and ownership structure is a key issue. Consequences for investors are important in the light of potential conflict of interest characterizing the sector, its recent low performance and the high commissions charged to mutual fund subscribers. The authors, therefore, also explore the products (mutual funds) offered by AMCs. In particular, the purpose of our research is to establish whether the ownership of Italian AMCs (independent or captive asset managers) influences the attributes, risk and performance of mutual funds. We use Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR), the statistical multi-equational method formulated by Zellner (1962). Results show that the ownership of Italian AMCs may affect mutual fund attributes, their performance and risk. Finally, a better ownership structure of asset managers could contribute to improving the Italian asset management market and customer satisfaction.