Taxable and Tax-Deferred Investing with the Limited Use of Losses

We study the impact of the different tax treatment of capital gains and losses on the optimal location of assets in taxable and tax-deferred accounts. The classical result of Black (1980) and Tepper (1981) suggests that investors should follow a strict pecking-order asset location rule and hold those assets that are subject to the highest tax rate preferentially in tax-deferred accounts. We show that with the different tax treatment of realized gains and losses, only tax-efficient equity mutual funds are optimally held in taxable accounts whereas mutual funds with average tax-(in)efficiency are preferentially held in tax-deferred accounts