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More Laws, More Growth? Evidence from U.S. States

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  • Elliott Ash
  • Massimo Morelli
  • Matia Vannoni

Abstract

This paper analyzes the conditions under which more legislation contributes to economic growth. In the context of U.S. states, we apply natural language processing tools to measure legislative flows for the years 1965-2012. We implement a novel shift-share design for text data, where the instrument for legislation is leave-one-out legal-topic flows interacted with pre-treatment legal-topic shares. We find that at the margin, higher legislative output causes more economic growth. Guided by a simple model of reform decision-making under uncertainty, we find that the effect is driven by contingent clauses, that the effect is concave in the preexisting stock of legislation, and that the effect size is increasing with economic policy uncertainty.

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  • Elliott Ash & Massimo Morelli & Matia Vannoni, 2022. "More Laws, More Growth? Evidence from U.S. States," BAFFI CAREFIN Working Papers 22178, BAFFI CAREFIN, Centre for Applied Research on International Markets Banking Finance and Regulation, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy.
    • Handle: RePEc:baf:cbafwp:cbafwp22178
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    Cited by:

    1. Amoroso, Sara & Herrmann, Benedikt & Kritikos, Alexander S., 2023. "The Role of Regulation and Regional Government Quality for High Growth Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," IZA Discussion Papers 16563, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Bartolozzi, D. & Gara, M. & Marchetti, D.J. & Masciandaro, D., 2022. "Designing the anti-money laundering supervisor: The governance of the financial intelligence units," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 1093-1109.
    3. Sara Amoroso & Benedikt Herrmann & Alexander S. Kritikos, 2023. "The Role of Regulation and Regional Government Quality for High Growth Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," CEPA Discussion Papers 71, Center for Economic Policy Analysis.
    4. Sara Amoroso & Benedikt Herrmann & Alexander S. Kritikos, 2023. "The Role of Regulation and Regional Government Quality for High Growth Firms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 2053, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    5. Laura Battaglia & Timothy Christensen & Stephen Hansen & Szymon Sacher, 2024. "Inference for Regression with Variables Generated from Unstructured Data," Papers 2402.15585, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.

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    Keywords

    Legislative production; growth; regulatory complexity; economic uncertainty;
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