Seminar More Laws More Growth? An Empirical Investigation for US States Econometrics/Applied Microeconomics Seminar Add to calendar 2022-02-21 11:00 2022-02-21 12:15 Europe/Rome More Laws More Growth? An Empirical Investigation for US States Seminar Room 3rd Floor Villa La Fonte YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Feb 21 2022 11:00 - 12:15 CET Seminar Room 3rd Floor, Villa La Fonte Organised by Department of Economics In this seminar, Massimo Morelli (Bocconi University) will present his co-authored paper "More Laws More Growth? An Empirical Investigation for US States." This paper analyzes the conditions under which more detailed legislation contributes to economic growth. In the context of U.S. states, we apply natural language processing tools to measure legislative flows for the years 1965-2012. We implement a novel shift-share design for text data, where the instrument for legislation is leave-one-out legal-topic flows interacted with pre-treatment legal topic shares. We find that at the margin, higher legislative detail causes more economic growth. Motivated by an incomplete-contracts model of legislative detail, we test and find that the effect is driven by contingent clauses, that the effect is concave in the pre-existing level of detail, and that the effect size is increasing with economic policy uncertainty.Co-authors: Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich) and Matia Vannoni (King’s College London)Due to limited spaces for COVID restrictions, participation on site will be allowed on a first-come, first-served basis. The event will also be live-streamed via zoom. Participants will receive the zoom link once registered.