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...

In this paper, an index of the depth of experience with state-level institutions, or state antiquity, is derived for a large set of countries. We show that state antiquity is significantly correlated with measures of political stability and institutional quality, with income per capita, and with...

This paper provides a framework that decomposes aggregate total factor productivity ("TFP") into a component reflecting relative efficiency across sectors, and another component that reflects the absolute level of efficiency. A development accounting analysis suggests that as much as 85% of the...