Research has established that dividend policy should be irrelevant to stock returns, yet investors have long demonstrated an irrational preference for them. Mutual fund providers are well-aware of this fact.
Earlier this week, we reviewed a pair of studies showing that mutual fund managers exploit investors’ well-documented preference for cash dividends to attract assets by artificially “juicing” the dividend yield, and that they use dividend-chasing behavior strategically to benefit themselves at the expense of fund investors. Today we’ll tackle some possible explanations for investors’ anomalous behavior.
Read the rest of the article on ETF.com.
