The claim that lawyers act as gatekeepers or certifiers in financial transactions is widely discussed in the legal literature. There has, however, been little empirical examination of the claim. We test the hypothesis that law firms have replaced investment banks as the gatekeepers of the market...

A substantial portion of the slowdown in productivity and economic growth in the seventies and eighties cannot be ascribed to traditional factors. We have found one potential additional source: the dramatic growth in the scale of government. Employing a theoretical model of output growth, we...