We develop a strategy to measure the economic costs of poorly written laws, a potential threat to the rule of law. Using the full corpus of Italian legislation, we show that legal uncertainty - measured by the probability of disagreement between the Supreme Court of Cassation and lower courts -...

A well-known fact in the time series of aggregate output is the persistence of shocks. This paper argues that the empirical relation between the expected growth rate of a firm and its size provides a microfoundation of aggregate persistence. In fact, the empirical evidence claims that small...