The economic significance of the tax on cross-border dividends depends on the limits to dividend arbitrage. In the case of Canadian payments to the U.S. we observe these limits exactly because we see the actual pricing of the dividend-arbitrage transactions. These transactions recover only some...

The standard analysis of corporate governance is that shareholders vote in the ratios that firms choose, such as one-share-one-vote. But if the cost of unbundling and trading votes is sufficiently low, then shareholders choose the ratios. We document an active market for votes within the...

Fund managers can demand liquidity for their trading ideas or provide liquidity for others' ideas. We identify the roles of these motives using a database of the individual transactions by Canadian equity funds. Both the cost and subsequent performance of their buys decline after strong inflows,...

We ask whether mutual funds' flows reflect the incentives of the brokers intermediating them. The incentives we address are those revealed in statutory filings: the brokers' shares of sales loads and other revenue, and their affiliation with the fund family. We find significant effects of these...

Until recently, all Canadian mutual funds were required to disclose all their individual trades, offering a unique and ideal opportunity to measure and analyze the cost and performance of mutual funds' trades. We find that active management delivers both cheaper trades and better subsequent...