You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: AMG entered 2021 in a position of strength, and our first-quarter results reflect the momentum that continues to build in our business.
Economic earnings per share of $4.28 improved 35% year over year and represented the strongest first quarter in our history, primarily driven by EBITDA growth of 23% and ongoing share repurchase activity.
Building on our strong start to the year and looking ahead to the second quarter and full year of 2021, we expect the growth in our business to accelerate, given the excellent affiliate investment performance, the ongoing contributions of the strategic actions we have taken and most significantly, heightened activity and new investments.
With our increasing free cash flow and available capital in a favorable environment to establish new partnerships, we have a tremendous opportunity to invest in high-quality firms operating in areas of secular growth such as our recent investments in OCP Asia and Boston Common.
The disciplined execution of our strategy, including the simultaneous return of excess capital to our shareholders, will further compound our earnings and free cash flow generation, and we are confident in our ability to create substantial shareholder value over time.
Over the past year, our affiliates built on their long-term performance records, once again demonstrating their ability to distinguish themselves during periods of volatility.
Excellent investment performance during this period generated meaningful first-quarter performance fees, increased asset levels and enhanced organic growth.
As performance-driven improvements in organic growth trends continue across our business, we are also seeing investors rerisking portfolios as economies reopen worldwide.
Investors are increasing allocations to high-quality active managers, especially independent firms to help navigate market volatility, protect capital and generate superior outcomes.
In addition to ongoing growth and flows in private markets, specialty fixed income and wealth management, AMG is benefiting from growing demand for fundamental equities and liquid alternatives, particularly in our top-performing value-oriented affiliates and in our active ESG strategies.
As these trends continue, and as we add new affiliates operating at secular demand areas, we expect ongoing improvement in our organic flow profile.
Further supporting this improving profile, AMG-led distribution efforts are adding incremental growth and momentum to our affiliates' new business activity.
Nearly 20 years ago, we began developing AMG-led distribution resources to complement the existing sales efforts of our affiliates.
And over the past two years, we strategically evolved our platform for the benefit of our affiliate partners and their clients, focusing on the largest growth opportunities while also better aligning our affiliates' in-demand products with the success of AMG distribution efforts.
wealth distribution, consistent with our institutional distribution strategy.
This change provides a more competitively priced, higher quality and more differentiated set of strategies exclusively managed by AMG affiliates.
With this repositioning now behind us, our distribution platforms are even more strategically compelling to both existing and new affiliates as well as our clients given the increased focus, resources and alignment.
And as part of our strategy, we will continue to evolve our AMG-led distribution resources to reflect the composition and needs of our affiliates and their clients over time.
AMG's enduring business model, providing a permanent solution for independent firms, enables us to be a true strategic partner to our affiliates distinct from any institutional competitor in the market today.
Our partnership model is simple.
We enhance our affiliates' ability to grow across generations, while preserving investment independence and operating autonomy.
We provide a uniquely broad set of partnership solutions to independent firms having expanded our solution set over the years beyond succession planning to include minority investments, growth capital and centralized distribution services on behalf of our affiliates.
As a result of this evolution, and given our strong competitive position, AMG's partnership approach today is even more attractive to a broader array of independent firms around the world.
Our new investment strategy is generating both growth and return.
Not only does our partnership approach self-select for growing firms, our discipline in structuring new investments generate meaningful returns for our shareholders across a range of business outcomes.
Over the past two years, we have meaningfully stepped up our focus and resources devoting to identifying and executing new partnerships with independent firms.
Additionally, we have concentrated our prospecting efforts on independent firms operating in areas of strong secular growth and client demand, including private markets, fixed income alternatives, the Asia Pacific region, ESG and multi-asset solutions.
With this enhanced focus, we expect new investments to be a significant source of forward earnings growth.
As we continue to execute on our growing opportunity set over the course of 2021, each new affiliate will add immediately to our earnings.
And the full impact of AMG's earnings power and growth profile will only fully materialize starting in 2022.
Evidencing the momentum we are seeing in new investments, last week, we announced our second partnership this year.
Recognized as the leader in Asian private credit, OCP Asia, has consistently generated excellent returns for its clients.
The cultural alignment between AMG and OCP Asia is very strong, and the key principles of OCP were attracted to our partnership approach and the opportunity to expand and extend our client reach through our global distribution capabilities.
This new partnership enhances and diversifies our exposure both to private markets and to Asia, where we see increasing allocation.
We are excited to partner with Stu, Teall, Dan and the broader team as they continue to provide differentiated investment returns and capitalize on their growth initiatives.
Finally, as I said last quarter, the contributions from the strategic and growth investments that we have made over the past two years are not only materializing in our results today, but will also more fully manifest in the coming quarters.
Since the beginning of 2019, we have invested in six new affiliates.
We've invested in the growth of our existing affiliates.
We have broadened our partnership solution set.
We've enhanced our strategic capabilities.
We have realigned our distribution platform.
We have significantly enhanced our capital position and we repurchased nearly 20% of our shares outstanding.
We have achieved all of this while reinvigorating AMG's entrepreneurial culture in reestablishing an ownership mindset across the organization.
Looking ahead, we have significant momentum on our business, and we see AMG's growth accelerating.
With strong affiliate investment performance and improving organic growth profile and increasing opportunities to invest in excellent partner-owned firms, we are confident in our ability to execute on our substantial opportunity set and continue to create shareholder value.
As we discussed on our fourth-quarter call, focused execution against our strategy is producing significant growth, as was once again evidenced by our strong first quarter.
Our earnings power and cash flow generation continue to increase, and our unique ability to deploy capital across our broad opportunity set to grow EBITDA and earnings per share is a key differentiator.
Looking forward, the value proposition we offer independent partner-owned firms, together with an increasingly favorable environment for active managers, position AMG well to compound earnings growth over time and generate meaningful shareholder value.
Our first-quarter results reflect the significant momentum we're seeing across our business.
Adjusted EBITDA of $247 million grew 23% year over year, driven by strong affiliate investment performance and the impact of our growth investments.
Economic earnings per share of $4.28 grew 35% year over year further benefiting from share repurchase activity.
Net client cash flows for the quarter improved meaningfully versus prior periods, and flows representing the vast majority of our EBITDA turned positive, excluding certain quantitative strategies.
Ongoing strength in private markets, specialty-fixed income and wealth management strategies continue to drive strong flows.
Increased demand for fundamental equity and liquid alternatives, particularly top-performing value and impact-oriented strategies, also contributed, as clients continue to position portfolios for a post-pandemic world.
Turning to performance across our business and excluding certain quantitative strategies.
In alternatives, fundraising remains strong at Pantheon, Baring, EIG and Comvest as clients continue to steadily increase private market allocations globally, and we reported net inflows of $2.8 billion in the first quarter.
Performance in this category is excellent, as our affiliates have been deploying dry powder into attractive return opportunities, including across Asia private equity, global secondaries, coinvestments and credit.
Overall, our private markets book remains a significant source of earnings growth, accounting for nearly 20% of management fee EBITDA with increasing future carried interest potential.
We continue to add high-quality partnerships in the sector, including our investment in OCP Asia, which I'll elaborate further on in a moment.
Within liquid alternatives, our affiliates are posting strong performance across relative value fixed income in light of ongoing volatility in bond markets as well as in concentrated long-only strategies.
We are seeing increased client interest in this category as clients look for alternative sources of yield and return.
Capula, Garda and ValueAct continue to generate excellent investment performance, translating to strong performance fees and demonstrating the attractiveness and resiliency of these strategies.
Moving to fundamental equities.
We continue to see strong performance across a range of affiliates.
In U.S. equities, we reported net inflows of $300 million.
The outperformance of value strategies following decade-long headwinds is leading to increased conversations with clients and are focused on the highest quality independent firms in the industry, benefiting affiliates like River Road and Yacktman.
In global equities, net outflows of $3.9 billion were driven by redemptions in regionally focused strategies.
Affiliates continue to deliver strong investment performance across a range of strategies, including at Harding Loevner, Veritas and Artemis.
Multi-asset and fixed income strategies continue to produce steady long-duration inflows, and we anticipate ongoing client demand trends will support future growth.
These strategies generated $900 million in net client cash flows during the quarter, primarily driven by ongoing demand for muni bond strategy at GW&K and stable growth across our wealth management affiliates.
Overall, affiliate investment performance and flow trends continue on a positive trajectory as clients increasingly turn to independent active managers to deliver superior investment outcomes.
And we continue to pivot our business toward areas of secular growth through investments in existing affiliates and new affiliates, which will further enhance our organic growth profile going forward.
Now, turning to financials.
For the first quarter, adjusted EBITDA of $247 million grew 23% year over year, driven by strong affiliate investment performance.
Adjusted EBITDA included $42 million of performance fees, reflecting outstanding performance in certain liquid alternative strategies.
Economic earnings per share of $4.28 grew by 35% year over year, further benefiting from share repurchase activity.
Now moving to specific modeling items for the second quarter.
We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $210 million to $220 million based on current AUM levels, reflecting our market blend, which was up 3% as of Friday.
Our estimate includes performance fees of up to $10 million and the impact of our newest investments in OCP Asia and Boston Common.
As a reminder, the second and third quarters are typically lower performance fee quarters due to the timing of performance fee crystallization.
Our share of interest expense was $27 million for the first quarter, and we expect interest expense to remain at a similar level for the second quarter.
Controlling interest depreciation was $2 million in the first quarter, and we expect the second quarter to be at a similar level.
Our share of reported amortization and impairments was $41 million for the first quarter, and we expect it to be $35 million in the second quarter.
Our effective GAAP and cash tax rates were 24% and 20%, respectively, for the first quarter, and we expect similar levels for the second quarter.
Intangible-related deferred taxes were $9 million in the first quarter, and we expect an $11 million level in the second quarter.
Other economic items were negative $15 million and included the mark-to-market impact on GP and seed capital investments.
In the second quarter, for modeling purposes, we expect other economic items, excluding any mark-to-market impact, on GP and seed to be $1 million.
Our adjusted weighted average share count for the first quarter was $43.2 million, and we expect our share count to be approximately $42.4 million for the second quarter.
Finally, turning to the balance sheet and capital allocation.
Our balance sheet remains in an excellent position with significant access to liquidity and a flexible long-duration debt profile, and we continue to look for ways to further enhance our capital structure.
We are generating strong and growing free cash flow and are well-positioned to invest our capital through the disciplined execution of our strategy, including through new investment partnerships that create significant value over time.
First, we are focused on investing in high-growth businesses in areas of secular demand.
So new investments are generally growing faster than our existing business in terms of both flows and revenues, enhancing our organic growth profile and our EBITDA growth.
Next, new investments not only contribute immediately to our EBITDA, but we can also debt finance a portion of our purchase price and often achieve incremental tax benefits, enhancing the returns we deliver to our shareholders.
And finally, as we execute on our strategy, we continue to take a disciplined approach to pricing and structure, targeting risk-adjusted returns well in excess of our cost of capital across a range of potential outcomes.
Taken together, new investments generate immediate earnings and organic growth and are strategically important to the long-term growth and sustainability of our business.
Our most recent investment in OCP Asia is a great example of the value of investing in new affiliates.
We took a minority interest in the business through a revenue share, with a structure designed to minimize earnings volatility.
The business is growing at double digits organically and is priced to deliver attractive returns across a range of outcomes.
We expect the business to contribute $0.20 of incremental economic earnings per share in 2021 and $0.33 in 2022, including $16 million of EBITDA in 2022.
Our renewed focus on disciplined capital allocation ensures that every dollar we invest runs through a common framework so that we are making growth investments that clearly meet our risk and return criteria and then returning excess capital to our shareholders through repurchases.
In the first quarter, we repurchased $210 million of shares and now have repurchased nearly 20% of our shares outstanding over the past two years.
We are focused on continuing to reduce our share count through repurchases over time, and we remain on track to repurchase $500 million of shares this year.
As always, this is subject to change based on market conditions and the timing of new investments.
We are well-positioned to compound earnings growth over time through new investments, investment performance, flows and share repurchases.
The momentum in our business is accelerating and the combination of our strategy, our capital position and a favorable environment to invest for growth underscore the many reasons to be excited about AMG going forward.

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qtrly economic earnings per share of $4.28.

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