In a seminal study, Elton and Gruber (1970) argue that ex-dividend day pricing can be used to infer the marginal tax rates of shareholders. If this view is correct, managers of individual firms would be provided with information of relevance to major financing and distribution decisions. We...

This study uses the trading records of institutional equity funds to examine their ex-dividend trading behaviour. We argue that trading is influenced by the tax incentives facing the fund, the characteristics of individual stocks and by changes in tax legislation. In aggregate, institutions...