Does Economic Freedom Lighten the Blow? Evidence from the Great Recession in the United States

The Great Recession led to a large decline in economic activity throughout the entire United States with significant variation in its severity across regions. Our paper examines the role of economic freedom in explaining these differences at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. We use the Stansel (2013; 2019) MSA-level economic freedom index to analyze the relationship between institutional quality and economic outcomes throughout the crisis period. Using a panel dataset of 382 MSAs from 2002-2012, we find that economic freedom is associated with enhanced economic outcomes – lower unemployment rates, more employment per 100 persons, and higher income per capita. This holds true even when examining a cross-section of MSAs using data from the crisis period alone. We supplement these findings with a matching analysis where we find that MSAs that experienced meaningful increases in economic freedom in the five-year period before the Great Recession (2002 – 2007) had quicker recoveries – in terms of unemployment rates and income – than their matched counterfactuals from 2007 – 2012. Overall, our findings suggest that economic freedom did “lighten the blow” from the Great Recession