New Paper Says Regulation Not Strangling the Economy

In a new paper, Alex Tabarrok and Nathan Goldschlag investigate whether heavyhanded government regulation has been responsible for a decline in dynamism in the American economy. They define dynamism about the way you’d expect: fewer startups, less job creation, aging firms, and weak productivity growth. Their approach is pretty simple: different sectors of the economy are regulated at different levels, so if regulation is at fault you’d expect to see a correlation between, say, regulation level and startup activity. But you don’t:

One paper doesn’t settle anything, of course, but this is basically an admission against interest since I doubt that Tabarrok wanted to come up with this answer. But he did. And as he notes, the paper got published in a good journal even though it’s a negative result. That’s good! Negative results should get published more often.

Needless to say, this doesn’t imply that regulation is good. It just says that regulation doesn’t seem to be responsible for reduced entrepreneurial activity or weak productivity growth. The answer lies somewhere else.

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate