Search Results
Working Paper
Quantifying Deregulation and its Economic Effects: A Large Language Model Approach
We construct a news-based index of deregulation for the United States from 1960 through 2025 using AI to semantically classify newspaper articles. We distinguish articles discussing deregulation from those discussing increased regulation, assigning intensity scores that reflect both the centrality of deregulatory content and whether articles discuss advocacy, proposals, or enacted measures. Human validation confirms strong agreement between AI and human classifications. The deregulation index captures major reform episodes including transportation and telecommunications liberalization in the ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Price Controls in Two-sided Markets : Evidence from US Debit Card Interchange Fee Regulation
We study the pricing of deposit accounts following a regulation that capped debit card interchange fees in the United States and provide the first empirical investigation of the link between interchange fees and granular deposit account prices. This link is broadly predicted by the theoretical literature on two-sided markets, but the nature and magnitude of price changes are key empirical issues. To examine the ways that banks adjusted their account prices in response to the regulatory cap on interchange fees, we exploit the cap's differential applicability across banks and account types, ...
Working Paper
Cross-border banking on the two sides of the Atlantic: does it have an impact on bank crisis management?
In the United States and the European Union (EU), political incentives to oppose cross-border banking have been strong in spite of the measurable benefits to the real economy from breaking down geographic barriers. Even a federal-level supervisor and safety net are not by themselves sufficient to incentivizing cross-border banking although differences in the institutional set-up are reflected in the way the two areas responded to the crisis. The U.S. response was a coordinated response, and the cost of resolving banks was borne at the national level. Moreover, the Federal Deposit Insurance ...
Report
Do long-haul truckers undervalue future fuel savings?
The U.S. federal government enacted fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy trucks for the first time in September 2011. Rationales for using this policy tool typically depend upon frictions existing in the marketplace or consumers being myopic, such that vehicle purchasers undervalue the future fuel savings from increased fuel efficiency. We measure by how much long-haul truck owners undervalue future fuel savings by employing recent advances to the classic hedonic approach to estimate the distribution of willingness-to-pay for fuel efficiency. We find significant heterogeneity in ...
Report
Does Universal Occupational Licensing Recognition Improve Patient Access? Evidence from Healthcare Utilization
Optimizing physician labor supply has been an important policy issue in healthcare in the United States. One of the proposed solutions has been the universal licensing recognition (ULR), which allows out-of-state physicians to provide healthcare services without relicensing and increases the local labor supply of physicians. There has been no empirical analysis of the effect of such regulatory relaxation on the local labor supply and subsequent improvements of consumer welfare. In this study, we use the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to investigate the effect of universal ...
Working Paper
Data, Privacy Laws and Firm Production: Evidence from the GDPR
By regulating how firms collect, store, and use data, privacy laws may change the role of data in production and alter firm demand for information technology inputs. We study how firms respond to privacy laws in the context of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using seven years of data from a large global cloud-computing provider. Our difference-in-difference estimates indicate that, in response to the GDPR, EU firms decreased data storage by 26% and data processing by 15% relative to comparable U.S. firms, becoming less “data-intensive.” To estimate the costs of the ...
Working Paper
Information Production, Misconduct Effort, and the Duration of Corporate Fraud
We develop and test a model linking the duration of financial fraud to information produced by auditors and analysts and efforts by managers to conceal the fraud. Our empirical results suggest fraud termination is more likely in the quarter following the release of audited financial statements, especially when reports contain explanatory language, indicating auditors? observable signals reduce fraud duration. Analyst attention increases the likelihood of fraud termination, but the marginal effect beyond the first analyst is negative, possibly due to free riding and herding behavior impairing ...
Working Paper
Does Price Regulation Affect Competition? Evidence from Credit Card Solicitations
We study the unintended consequences of consumer financial regulations, focusing on the CARD Act, which restricts consumer credit card issuers? ability to raise interest rates. We estimate the competitive responsiveness-the degree to which a credit card issuer changes offered interest rates in response to changes in interest rates offered by its competitors-as a measure of competition in the credit card market. Using small business card offers, which are not subject to the Act, as a control group, we find a significant decline in the competitive responsiveness after the Act. The decline in ...
Report
The Origins and Evolution of Occupational Licensing in the United States
The analysis of occupational licensing has concentrated largely on its labor market and consumer welfare effects. By contrast, relatively little is known about how occupational licensing laws originated or the key factors in their evolution. In this paper, we study the determinants of U.S. licensing requirements from 1870 to 2020. We begin by developing a model where licensing arises as an endogenous political outcome and use this framework to study how market characteristics and political incentives influence regulators’ choices. Our empirical analysis draws on a novel database tracking ...