Too much "skin in the game" ruins the game: Evidence from managerial capital gains taxes

Anna Bührle and Chia-Yi Yen

No 23-028, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Co-investment, often seen as a remedy for agency problems, may incentivize managers to cater to own preferences. We provide evidence that mutual fund managers with considerable co-investment stakes alter risk-taking decisions to prioritize their own tax interests. By exploiting the enactment of the American Taxpayer Relief Act 2012 as an exogenous shock of managerial capital gains taxes, we observe that co-investing fund managers increase risk-taking by 8%. Specifically, these managers adjust their portfolios by investing in stocks with higher beta. The observed effect appears to be driven by agency incentives, particularly for funds with a more convex flow-performance relationship and for managers who have underperformed. Such tax-induced behavior is associated with negative fund performance. We highlight the role of co-investment in transmitting managerial tax shocks to mutual funds.

Keywords: co-investment; risk-taking; taxation; mutual funds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 G18 G23 H24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023, Revised 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fmk, nep-pbe, nep-pub and nep-rmg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/279672/1/zew-dp23028rev.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:23028

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().