With a sluggish economy, high unemployment, and unprecedented deficit spending, growing the economy and curbing federal spending are top priorities in Washington. A now-popular target for reform is regulation, which even President Obama claims to have "stifled innovation" and to have had "a...

In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of government spending on private-sector job growth. Rather than contemplate the average or typical effect of government stimulus on private-sector jobs, we divide the past fifty years of U.S. economic history into low-growth and high-growth periods....

Each $1 million change in the regulatory budget is associated with a change of about four regulator jobs. With our new update, we now find that a 10% cut in the regulatory budget results in a loss of 21,756 regulatory jobs. Given the average jobs impact of 3 million jobs over the five-year...