Economists have, for some time, studied the factors that induce firm entry, lead to growth, and help firms succeed in various markets. Unfortunately, such patterns have not been considered for the so-called "green industries." Although policymakers might like to stimulate development of the green sectors in encouraging sustainable growth, one difficulty has been defining exactly what constitutes the green economy. We employ a recent, narrow definition proposed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to investigate and identify important factors for the green industries within the State of Texas. We find some differences between the green industries and all other industries, but these effects are often small relative to other major explanatory factors like agglomeration. The definition also partitions the green industry into five subcategories and we leverage this feature to study the importance of these factors for the intra-green industries and to identify the comparative advantage each county has within the green economy.JEL Classification: O44, Q56, R30.

Using BoardEx (2000BoardEx ( -2017, we create a dynamic network connecting firms and board directors for the United States. We use the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory to measure environmental performance at the director and firm-level. We examine how a candidate's environmental performance and networks affect director appointments. This allows us to endogenize the effect of directors' environmental experience when studying the impact on firms' chemical releases. We show that firms are likely to appoint influential directors with good environmental records and similar characteristics. Further, boards with good environmental performance and with diverse environmental backgrounds improve firms' environmental performance.

This paper documents the existence of primary dealers' losses in Treasury bond markets and investigates how these losses affect dealers' market value. Using a novel data set that tracks more than 2,350 primary-to-secondary transactions, we find that bond losses for primary dealers are prevalent and were severe during the financial crisis. Our results indicate that liquidity constraints are a major source of bond losses observed in primaryto-secondary trades. We also find that financial sector value is correlated with these losses. Using an alternating market experiment, we show that bond losses are higher under discriminatory auctions as compared to uniform auctions.

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Finding a theoretical explanation of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) has been difficult. Given that environmental quality improves as income and consumption increase, ceteris paribus, there must be an increase in remediation/abatement activity. In this paper, we provide theoretical conditions for an existence of a locality-based EKC when both output and abatement expenditures are increasing in income. We validate these predictions empirically using a detailed firm-level dataset in which environmental policies are uniform across locations. We also show that firms engaging in abatement activity tend to locate near polluting firms while income also plays a significant role in location choice.