We introduce a new time series measure of the extent of federal regulation in the U.S. and use it to investigate the relationship between federal regulation and macroeconomic performance. We find that regulation has statistically and economically significant effects on aggregate output and the...

Data quality in the Penn World Tables varies systematically across countries that have different growth rates and at different stages of economic development, thus introducing measurement error correlated with variables of economic interest. We explore the seriousness of this problem with three...

Trade is shown to affect economic growth purely through comparative advantage; unlike previous literature, this result does not depend on the presence of scale effects, technology transfer, research and development, or even international investment. The resulting growth rates are those that would...