Is there an equivalent of cd - for cp or mv?

If your shell has cd -, then it will likely have either the special variable $OLDPWD and/or the shortcut ~- for the directory you've been in previously.

cp Makefile LICENSE "$OLDPWD/"

cp Makefile LICENSE ~-

cat ~-/Makefile

Indeed the POSIX shell language (upon which ksh/bash/zsh are built) specifies that cd - should be equal to cd "$OLDPWD".

You can always use shell backquotes.

They act like a subshell : the command in the backquotes is executed first, and its output is placed as argument of the main command.

~/folderA$ cd ../folderB  
~/folderB$ cp Makefile `cd -`  
# gets expended to "cp Makefile ~/folderA"