This paper examines the impact of start-up regulations and institutional quality on the level of new business activity in a panel of 119 countries between 2001 and 2012. We find robust evidence that new business creation is significantly lower in countries with excessive barriers to entry, a...

Numerous regulatory reform proposals would require federal agencies to conduct more thorough economic analysis of proposed regulations or expand the resources and influence of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which currently reviews executive branch regulations. Such...

Since 1974, executive orders have required executive branch regulatory agencies to produce some form of economic analysis when promulgating significant regulations. However, both case study research and regulatory analysis “scorecards” find that the quality of regulatory analysis varies...

Scholarly research demonstrates that Regulatory Impact Analysis often falls short of the standards articulated in executive orders and Office of Management and Budget guidance. More often than not, agencies do not appear to use the Regulatory Impact Analysis to inform major decisions. Regulatory...

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University initiated its Regulatory Report Card project in 2009 to assess how well executive branch regulatory agencies conduct and use regulatory impact analysis and to identify ways to motivate improvement. Report Card evaluations reveal that agencies often...

States merge small and medium sized municipalities to achieve economies of scale. Little is known to which extent mergers of large local governments reduce expenditures. I use the synthetic control method to identify the effect of mergers of county-sized administrations in Germany (districts) on...

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of total government spending. By employing both time-series and province-level panel data,...

Viele Mitgliedstaaten der Europäischen Union vergeben staatliche Innovationshilfen, um die Innovationstätigkeit von Unternehmen anzuregen. Abhängig davon, ob die Förderung auf der Ebene der Länder, des Bundes oder der Europäischen Union angesiedelt ist, werden unterschiedliche Effekte...

The study presents a macro-finance model to analyze the impacts of a fiscal policy shock in the Brazilian term structure of interest rate in the period 1999-2010. Fiscal policy explains a higher proportion of the long-term interest rate variance (25% of the five years rate) comparing to the...

The theory of optimal currency areas states that a currency union may succeed if the participating countries have complementary industry structures. If this is not the case a currency union does not, inevitably, have to fail because market forces will induce adjustments of the industry...