Female labor market choices depend on the availability, affordability, and quality of child care. In this paper, we evaluate different regulatory measures and their effect on both the quality and the cost of child care. First, we analyze data on regulations and costs to estimate the effect of...

Many scholars have worried that regulation deters entrepreneurship because larger firms can overcome the costs of complying with regulations more easily than smaller firms. Using novel data on the extent of US federal regulations by industry at the four-digit NAICS (North American Industry...

A growing body of literature analyzing the distributive consequences of regulation suggests that regulation may have particularly detrimental effects on lower income households. Regulation can be regressive if it represents the preferences of the wealthy while imposing costs on all households....

Politics makes strange bedfellows, including alliances of profiteers and moralists who lobby for the same regulations, but for vastly different reasons. Whether such coalitions promote alcohol prohibition (as did the bootleggers and Baptists to whom similar “unholy alliances” are likened),...

Theories of political entrepreneurship usually focus on the construction of coalitions necessary to change policy. We argue that political entrepreneurs who are unable to secure favored policies may redirect their efforts to a “higher tier,” attempting to change the rules of the game to...

Taking James Buchanan’s 1963 presidential address to the Southern Economic Association as our point of departure, we summarize some of the contributions to the literatures of economics and political science that responded over the next 50 years to his challenge to concentrate on “exchange”...

Female labor market choices depend on the availability, affordability, and quality of child care. In this paper, we evaluate different regulatory measures and their effect on both the quality and the cost of child care. First, we analyze data on regulations and costs to estimate the effect of...

During his presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama criticized sharply the lax antitrust law enforcement record of the George W. Bush administration. Subsequently, his first assistant attorney general for antitrust even went so far as to suggest that the Great Recession was, at least in part,...

Local self-governance institutions, which emerge through a slow trial and error process, can solve common property resource problems. Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize winner in economics, suggests in her work that the presence of local leaders is a prerequisite for the successful solution of...