A finance researcher has a unique ability to either implement or publish interesting and useful findings. If you have a sufficient reputation and access to capital, you should keep any findings to yourself. If you have no access to capital and want to build a reputation, you publish anomalies. This implies that for an older finance scholar of sufficient reputation, anything they publish will be boring because if it was truly of practical importance they could and would have funded its exploitation.

From a new paper by Colbrin Wright posted at the SSRN:

The theory predicts that researchers with few (many) publications and lesser (stronger) reputations have the highest (lowest) incentive to publish market anomalies. Employing probit models, simple OLS regressions, and principal component analysis, I show that (a) market anomalies are more likely to be published by researchers with fewer previous publications and who have been in the field for a shorter period of time and (b) the profitability of published market anomalies is inversely related to the common factor spanning the number of publications the author has and the number of years that have elapsed since the professor earned his Ph.D. The empirical results suggest that the probability of publishing an anomaly and the profitability of anomalies that are published are inversely related to the reputation of the authors.