Do financial advisors provide tangible benefits for investors? Evidence from tax-motivated mutual fund flows

Gjergji Cici, Alexander Kempf and Christoph Sorhage

CFR Working Papers from University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR)

Abstract: Rationality would suggest that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from costly financial advice. However, evidence documenting these benefits for U.S. investors has so far been lacking. This paper is the first to document that U.S. mutual fund investors indeed receive one of the many previously hypothesized benefits associated with financial advice. The documented benefit comes from valuable tax-management advice that helps investors avoid taxable fund distributions and becomes even more valuable when investors face distributions that can cause large and hard-to-predict tax liabilities. Additional evidence suggests that financial advice helps with other aspects of tax management such as tax-loss selling.

Keywords: Mutual funds; Taxable fund distributions; Financial advisors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 G11 G24 H24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-ger and nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cfrwps:1209r5

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