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

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  • Ash, Elliott
  • Morelli, Massimo
  • Vannoni, Matia

Abstract

This paper analyzes the conditions under which more detailed 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 detail causes more economic growth. Motivated by an incomplete-contracts model of legislative detail, we test and find that the effect is driven by contingent clauses, that the effect is concave in the pre-existing level of detail, and that the effect size is increasing with economic policy uncertainty.

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  • Ash, Elliott & Morelli, Massimo & Vannoni, Matia, 2022. "More Laws, More Growth? Evidence from U.S. States," CEPR Discussion Papers 15629, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15629
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    2. 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.
    3. 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).
    4. Laura Battaglia & Timothy M. Christensen & Stephen Hansen & Szymon Sacher, 2024. "Inference for regression with variables generated from unstructured data," CeMMAP working papers 10/24, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    5. 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.

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