One of the central trends in equity markets has been the movement of investor dollars from higher fee, actively managed mutual funds to lower cost, passive funds indexed to a benchmark. In the middle ground - between full active management and passive benchmarking - has been the proliferation of smart beta funds that offer low cost passive indexing, but to an index comprised of constituents with characteristics that may deliver long-run outperformance.
In this middle ground, dividend growth indices have garnered meaningful flows (including some of my mine). Academic studies have shown the dividend payers