We study how the U.S. government’s anti-counterfeiting enforcement actions through Special 301 Reports influence U.S. businesses. We show that anti-counterfeiting enforcement in foreign countries improves U.S. firms’ sales, profitability, and valuations. Firms significantly reduce capital and research and development investments when their brands and products are protected from counterfeiting activities. Anti-counterfeiting enforcement measures also improve brand asset value, brand profitability, brand inventiveness, market penetration, and customer loyalty.

Constructing a novel database on the real-estate holdings of public firms, we show that distressed firms sell their real-estate assets at a discount relative to healthy firms. We find that distress discount in real-estate assets is less pronounced for sellers with less liquidity-constrained industry peers and in machinery-heavy industries. We also document that asset redeployability and the availability of potential buyers are two important property-specific determinants of the distress discount. Additionally, firms’ property portfolios that are less redeployable with less potential buyers exacerbate the negative impact of financial distress on the cost of borrowing.

We test a frog-in-the-pan (FIP) hypothesis that predicts investors are inattentive to information arriving continuously in small amounts. Intuitively, we hypothesize that a series of frequent gradual changes attracts less attention than infrequent dramatic changes. Consistent with the FIP hypothesis, we find that continuous information induces strong persistent return continuation that does not reverse in the long run. Momentum decreases monotonically from 5.94% for stocks with continuous information during their formation period to –2.07% for stocks with discrete information but similar cumulative formation-period returns. Higher media coverage coincides with discrete information and mitigates the stronger momentum following continuous information.

We provide evidence that bond fund managers misclassify their holdings, and that these misclassifications have a real and significant impact on investor capital flows. The problem is widespread, resulting in up to 31.4% of funds being misclassified with safer profiles, compared to their true, publicly reported holdings. “Misclassified funds”—those that hold risky bonds but claim to hold safer bonds—appear to on‐average outperform lower risk funds in their peer groups. Within category groups, misclassified funds receive more Morningstar stars and higher investor flows. However, when we correctly classify them based on actual risk, these funds are mediocre performers.