Are financial advisors useful? : evidence from tax-motivated mutual fund flows

This study shows that financial advisors provide useful tax advice to their clients, being the first to provide evidence of tangible benefits delivered by financial advisors in the U.S. We find that investors who purchase mutual fund shares through financial advisors exhibit a stronger tendency of avoiding taxable distributions than investors who buy shares directly. This differential is more pronounced for distributions that have large tax implications and are hard-to-predict. Furthermore, the differential gets stronger in December but only when investors face large capital losses, consistent with financial advisors helping the former investors engage in tax-loss selling. -- mutual funds ; taxable fund distributions ; financial advisors ; after-tax returns