For a century, zoning has been the quintessential form of land use regulation in the United States. But in Maine, at least 200 towns continue to regulate land use without dividing their territory into districts subject to differing regulation. I use qualitative and statistical methods to...

Previous research speculates that some regulations are counterproductive in the sense that they increase (rather than decrease) mortality risk. However, few empirical studies have measured the extent to which this phenomenon holds across the regulatory system as a whole. Using a novel US state...

We exploit a quasi-natural experiment to identify the effect of regulatory accumulation on economic growth. Following a decade of poor economic growth, the Canadian province of British Columbia implemented a regulatory budget in 2001. We use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the...

In this paper, we employ machine learning techniques to capture heterogeneity in free trade agreements. The tools of machine learning allow us to quantify several features of trade agreements, including volume, comprehensiveness, and legal enforceability. Combining machine learning results with...

Independent work and the growing on-demand and crowdwork-based job opportunities facilitated by digital platforms, which have emerged as the gig economy, provide a unique opportunity to examine the differences in work characteristics between alternative and traditional labor arrangements....

New technologies and digital platforms have ushered in a rise of gig, freelance, contract, and other types of independent work. Although independent workers and the gig economy as a whole have received plenty of attention, little research has examined the heterogeneity of work characteristics...

Machine learning methods have made significant inroads in the social sciences. Computer algorithms now help scholars design cost-effective public policies, predict rare social events, and improve the allocation of funds. However, building and evaluating machine learning algorithms remain...

We use a computational linguistic algorithm to measure the topics covered in the text of school teacher contracts in Ohio. We use the topic modeling metrics in a calculation of the concentration of topics covered. This allows us to assess how expansive each contract is. As a proof of concept, we...

This paper makes the case for the adoption of nominal income targeting in the context of an improved governance and accountability framework for the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). The paper begins by outlining the existing governance and inflation targeting framework for Australian monetary...

We assess India’s healthcare capacity by comparing several countrywide and state-level metrics: per capita spending on healthcare, healthcare spending priority in budgets, hospital bed capacity, and capacity in terms of doctors, nurses, and total healthcare personnel. We find that, overall,...