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...

The passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010 continued a trend toward lengthier and more complex acts of Congress. We use novel metrics of the size, scope, and complexity of acts of Congress to assess Dodd-Frank's place in this trend. Our analysis is...

Mulligan and Shleifer (2005) put forward a theory of regulation in which a fixed cost of regulating leads larger polities to regulate more. This follows a prediction made in Demsetz (1967) that because institutions have fixed costs associated with their establishment, introducing an institution...

Recent empirical studies estimating the impact of US federal regulations on domestic business activity have reached seemingly contradictory conclusions. When measuring business activity with traditional measures of entrepreneurship (i.e., firm startups and job formation), some researchers...