This paper provides the first empirical test of the Portia Hypothesis: Females with masculine monikers are more successful in legal careers. Utilizing South Carolina microdata, we look for correlation between an individual's advancement to a judgeship and his/her name's masculinity, which we...

Information about collectively-created problems, such as air pollution, may elicit voluntary changes to consumer behavior that at least partially offset the cause of the problem. We show that increases in information about climate change are associated with statistically and economically...

We examine the correlation between federal government activity and the performance of the D.C. area's National Football League team, the Washington Redskins. We find a significantly positive, non-spurious, and robust correlation between the Redskins' winning percentage and the amount of federal...

We exploit a quasi-natural experiment to identify the effect of regulatory accumulation on economic growth. Following a decade of poor economic growth, the Canadian province of British Columbia implemented a regulatory budget in 2001. We use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the...

We explore how multilateral environmental regulations may adversely affect trade flows between countries with different incomes. Using the gravity equation, we examine the effect on bilateral trade flows of increases in environmental regulation stringency ratings, taken from survey data covering...

We estimate the effects of federal regulation on value added to GDP for a panel of 22 industries in the United States over a period of 35 years (1977–2012). The structure of our linear specification is explicitly derived from the closed-form solutions of a multisector Schumpeterian model of...