Haugen and Baker (1996) report that a long-short stock selection strategy based on more than 50 measures of accounting information and past return behavior would have generated excess returns of approximately 3% per month. We find that the Haugen and Baker strategies do not provide attractive returns after transaction costs if an investor already has access to strategy portfolios based on book-to-market and momentum. We also provide an extensive analysis of transaction costs over a long sample and we report results of independent interest to researchers in market microstructure.

We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s. Our work offers several innovations: first, most previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution. Second, many studies examine a single pollutant in isolation. We examine three “criteria” pollutants in a common framework. Third, we use rich individual-level data and pollution measured at the weekly level. Our most novel finding is a significant effect of CO on infant mortality: we find that reductions in carbon monoxide over the 1990s saved approximately 1000 infant lives in California.

China is an important counterexample to the findings in the law, institutions, finance, and growth literature: Neither its legal nor financial system is well developed, yet it has one of the fastest growing economies. While the law–finance–growth nexus applies to the State Sector and the Listed Sector, with arguably poorer applicable legal and financial mechanisms, the Private Sector grows much faster than the others and provides most of the economy's growth. The imbalance among the three sectors suggests that alternative financing channels and governance mechanisms, such as those based on reputation and relationships, support the growth of the Private Sector.

Party platforms differ sharply from one another, especially on issues with religious content, such as abortion or gay marriage. Given the high return to attracting the median voter, why do vote-maximizing politicians take extreme positions? In this paper we find that strategic extremism depends on an intensive margin where politicians want to induce their core constituents to vote (or make donations) and the ability to target political messages toward those core constituents. Our model predicts that the political relevance of religious issues is highest when around one-half of the voting population attends church regularly. Using data from across the world and within the United States, we indeed find a nonmonotonic relationship between religious extremism and religious attendance.