We study how state environmental review laws (SEPAs) shape local business activity. Using a stacked, border-pair event design around staggered SEPAs, we compare adjacent counties on either side of state lines. SEPA-side border counties experience slower post-adoption establishment and employment growth that cumulates into persistent level losses over two decades, with no mirror-image gains across the border and no broad underperformance in state interiors. Effects are strongest for SEPA-treated counties that border large metro areas or counties with substantial financial industries as well as when SEPAs have more economic bite. The SEPA-induced reduction in business growth falls most on pollution-intensive sectors and entirely among small firms. Overall, our findings suggest that local environmental regulations can erode local agglomerations, adversely affecting local small business growth.

Our findings reveal that ESG is everywhere in mutual fund investment decisions-playing an important role not only for ESG-designated funds but across all categories of mutual funds-ranking ahead of traditional factors such as momentum and book-to-market ratios. Surprisingly, ESG scores matter for all funds even in the most recent data, a period of arguably anti-ESG sentiment. We find that ESG scores have an even greater impact in brown industries, such as oil and gas, than in non-brown industries and for mutual fund managers with Democratic party leanings. These results highlight the evolving priorities of mutual fund managers, with ESG considerations increasingly integrated into investment strategies alongside traditional risk-return metrics.

We examine how financial markets value regulation versus courts as enforcement mechanisms for property rights by exploiting the Supreme Court’s 2024 reversal of Chevron deference (CD). We find wealth is redistributed from small firms to larger firms, consistent with larger firms possessing an advantage in courts due to their greater financial resources. Higher judicial uncertainty for small firms can explain most of the reduction in small firm value. These effects are amplified in districts with congested or ideologically imbalanced courts and reverse cleanly in 1984 when CD was first introduced, providing a forty-year mirror image. Our results highlight a trade-off between costly regulatory (ex-ante) versus uncertain judicial (ex-post) enforcement.

Whether anomalies reflect limits to arbitrage or information frictions is unresolved, in part because the two are difficult to separate empirically. I exploit anomalies’ long and short legs, where only short selling faces binding constraints. A new firm-specific delay measure, PD, and idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) moderate a composite anomaly signal. Information frictions amplify the anomaly only on the long leg; arbitrage risk moderates it symmetrically on both. On the long leg, PD and IVOL are complements, mattering only jointly; on the short leg they decouple, IVOL acting alone. PD is a pure moderator, not priced on its own, and survives extensive controls.

This paper shows that momentum profits concentrate among firms with high firm-specific price delay (PD), a firm-level measure of information friction. Theories of momentum attribute return continuation to the gradual incorporation of firm-specific information, yet direct empirical support has been elusive. Using the firm-specific price-delay measure of Parajuli (2025), I show that momentum is a conditional phenomenon: in Fama–MacBeth regressions, the interaction between PD and past returns subsumes the significance of past returns alone, so that momentum is strong among high-PD firms and absent among low-PD firms. The result strengthens under value-weighting and the exclusion of microcaps, and is robust to idiosyncratic volatility, transaction costs, illiquidity, existing price-delay measures, and other documented momentum drivers. It holds across ninety-one markets and survives an extensive battery of tests against a mechanical interpretation. By locating momentum in a measure of firm-specific price discovery, the findings provide direct empirical support for information-based theories of momentum.

I motivate and find empirical evidence that positive information is more valuable to investors than negative information. Post corporate under-(over-)valuation signals, information production increases (decreases), increasing (decreasing) price informativeness (PI). PI decreases more in firms with worse investment opportunities, poor corporate governance, more entrenched manager, and higher short-sale constraints. And, PI increases more in firms with better investment opportunities and higher investment-to-Q ratios. Results imply that market over-valuations are corrected slower than under-valuations and hence are stickier and more prevalent in the economy. Persistent and long-lasting performances of short-legs of anomaly portfolios could be the result of such a phenomenon.