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...

Recent empirical studies estimating the impact of US federal regulations on domestic business activity have reached seemingly contradictory conclusions. When measuring business activity with traditional measures of entrepreneurship (i.e., firm startups and job formation), some researchers...