Do Shareholders' Preferences Affect their Funds' Management? Evidence from the Cross Section of Shareholders and Funds

We consider how fund managers respond to the conflicting preferences of their investors. We focus on the conflict between the taxable and retirement accounts of international funds, which face different tradeoffs between dividends and capital gains. In principle, managers could resolve this conflict through dividend arbitrage, but a proprietary database of dividend-arbitrage transactions shows that in practice they cannot. Thus, managers must resolve it through their investment policies, and we find robust evidence that managers with more retirement money favor the preferences of retirement investors. We find additional evidence in the difference between U.S. and Canadian funds' portfolio weights.
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