Beware of Mutual Funds That Artificially Juice Their Dividend Yield

I like seeing my dividend income roll in each quarter, as do many other investors. But are mutual funds artificially “juicing” their reported dividend yields to attract investors? This is explored in a recent academic paper Juicing the Dividend Yield: Mutual Funds and the Demand for Dividends, which I found via Alpha Architect. Here is the abstract:

Some mutual funds purchase stocks before dividend payments to artificially increase their dividends, which we call “juicing.” Funds paid more than twice the dividends implied by their holdings in 7.4% of fund-years examined. Juicing is associated with larger inflows, and is more common among funds with unsophisticated investors. This behavior is consistent with an underlying investor demand for dividends, but is hard to explain by taxes or need for income, as funds can generate equivalent tax-free distributions by returning capital. Juicing is costly to investors through higher turnover and increased taxes of 0.57% to 1.52% of fund assets per year.

The problem with making extra trades to make your dividend yield look higher is that it is not tax-efficient. The increased turnover itself creates extra capital gains and trading costs. Also, when a funds buy a stock just before the ex-dividend date, then that dividend no longer qualifies for the lower dividend tax rate. I just ran across this problem last month when doing my taxes and looking at my qualified dividend income percentages. (I’m not saying that WisdomTree is not engaging in any “juicing” behaviors, it is very hard to actually calculate and there are other factors involved.)

Interestingly, the paper authors propose addressing that exact problem. Make it easier on investors and require funds to report their qualified dividend income percentages (emphasis mine):

One minimally intrusive regulatory change that could improve investor decision-making is to require funds to break out dividend income into qualified dividends (entitled to a reduced income tax rate, when the stock was held for 60 days or more) and non-qualified dividends (which pay the full income tax rate, for stocks held for less than 60 days) when reporting their distributions in filings such as annual reports. Such disclosure would not harm an investor that was already informed about juicing, but would ensure that investors had easy access to the information necessary to make an informed decision if they chose to do so.

Bottom line: Juicing exists and it hurts investors with higher turnover and higher tax bills, but it’s hard to know when by just looking at the usual mutual fund stats. Until then, be careful if you’re buying an actively-managed fund primarily due to their high dividend yield.