Citations & Impacts (68)
News articles
· 2026-07-16
Contributor: This next batch of elected senators will decide the fate of Social Security - Los Angeles Times
This is a Los Angeles Times opinion piece BY Veronique de Rugy (a Mercatus Center fellow, not Patrick A. McLaughlin) about Social Security reform; McLaughlin is not mentioned anywhere on the page.
News articles
· 2026-05-22
The Hidden Policy Crisis Behind America's Startup Decline
maintains RegData, a database that quantifies regulatory restrictions in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations across nearly five decades of industry-specific data. Using it, Dustin Chambers, Patrick McLaughlin, and Tyler Richards, there, found that "regulatory growth disproportionally burdens small businesses relative to large business; a 10 percent growth in regulatory restrictions in an industry
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Brennan Response to Arneson
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Figures and Tables
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
The Downsides of the Administrative State
Abstract This chapter examines the costs and limitations of the modern administrative state, which characterizes most social democracies. While extensive regulation is often justified as necessary for markets to function well, Brennan argues that liberal political philosophy should make us skeptical of broad regulatory regimes. Unlike taxation to fund social insurance, which reduces disposable inc…
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Introduction
Abstract This introduction sets the stage by moving beyond the long-settled socialism-versus-capitalism debate. The experience of the twentieth century showed that capitalist institutions far outperformed socialist ones in generating prosperity and improving living standards, even for the least well off. Countries that embraced market economies—such as Switzerland, Singapore, and South Korea—grew …
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Economic Growth Beats Redistribution
Abstract This chapter argues that eliminating world poverty requires prioritizing economic growth over redistribution. Brennan challenges the social democratic view that, in the absence of open borders, expansive welfare states provide the best alternative. Redistribution, whether within or between nations, cannot by itself eradicate poverty: The arithmetic of world product shows that equal slices…
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Arneson Response to Brennan
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Global Justice
Abstract So far this essay has argued that the practices of Nordic social democracy (NSD) deliver rising prosperity and well-being fairly distributed to the members of society and thus satisfy plausible egalitarian principles as fully as can be expected in our time. But what if we consider the impact of a state’s policies not only on its own citizens but on people everywhere, now and in the future…
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Egalitarian Principles
Abstract In the nineteenth century, critics of monarchies and aristocracies called for democracy, in which political decisions are made by majority rule elections in which each citizen has an equal vote, along with freedom of speech and association. Critics of early unregulated capitalism proposed that the democratic state should regulate the economy toward social equality—meaning what exactly? Th…
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Debating Capitalism
Abstract Which kind of capitalism is best? In this provocative and accessible book, two leading philosophers take up the question from opposing but overlapping perspectives. Jason Brennan defends a more laissez-faire, classically liberal vision of capitalism—one that prizes economic rights and cautions against the failures of government intervention. Richard Arneson argues for a more interventioni…
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
The Institutions and Objectives of Nordic Social Democracy
Abstract Nordic Social Democracy (NSD) arrangements include political democracy, a market economy, plus more. Social democratic acceptance of the market economy framework reflects an understanding that just as sustained cooperation among persons requires a state that coerces us by threat of penalties for noncooperation, sustained productive cooperation requires an organization of the economy that …
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Overview
Abstract Nordic Social Democracy (NSD) is a set of arrangements in place in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland that combines political democracy, a capitalist market economy with centralized wage bargaining, and welfare state policies that are extensive and generous, and in particular, generous to the poor. These countries feature high levels of taxation and government so…
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
Defending Nordic Social Democracy
Abstract If we should be egalitarians—let’s say, welfarist egalitarians—what social and political arrangements should we support? The Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, along with Finland, do more than other countries to equalize the post-tax post-transfer incomes of their citizens, reduce gaps between the opportunities of women and men, boost the employment rate of working-age cit…
Openalex Citation
· 2026-05-06
An Easy Choice
Abstract This chapter challenges the widespread belief that generous social democratic welfare states are incompatible with open borders. Contemporary social democracies tightly restrict immigration, excluding the world’s poorest workers from opportunities that could multiply their incomes and transform their lives. These restrictions are not only economically inefficient—cutting global production…
News articles
· 2026-04-06
Overrules
may impact incumbent profitability and operational efficiency more than competitive entry. Regulatory Stringency and Industry Performance: Evidence from RegData U.S. 6.0 Christos Makridis & Patrick McLaughlin Stanford Working Paper, February 2026 Abstract: This paper studies the economic incidence of broad federal regulation across U.S. industries using RegData U.S. 6.0. We measure regulatory stri
White House / CEA
· 2026-04-01
ERP 2026 2. Promoting Prosperity through Regulatory Reform
Fanned out from impact 17550 (owner-confirmed): the chapter cites Chambers, McLaughlin, and Stanley (2019) — links regulatory accumulation to higher state-level poverty rates.
Openalex Citation
· 2026-02-24
Less Red Tape more Green Shoots? Idaho's regulatory reforms and Entrepreneurial Dynamism
Openalex Citation
· 2025-09-10
A Practical Measure of Red Tape
ABSTRACT Regulation can influence economic dynamism, the distribution of income, and various measures of economic welfare. Despite a substantial proportion of regulation in the United States originating at the state level, we are not aware of any comprehensive measure of excess regulation or “red tape” at the state level. We fill this notable gap by constructing a novel measure of state‐level red …
Semantic Scholar
· 2025-01-01
Exposure to Regulation and Income Inequality in Local Labor Markets: Evidence from the U.S. Over the Past Half-Century
ABSTRACT
News articles
· 2024-10-16
Unlocking Opportunity: How Occupational Licensing Reform Would Promote Equitable Empowerment in Illinois
The Illinois Policy Institute report cites the Mercatus Center (McLaughlin's affiliation) on occupational licensing prevalence and references research on licensing's disproportionate impact on minorities and poor people, which aligns with McLaughlin's work on barriers to prosperity and entry regulations (Work 27).
Openalex Citation
· 2024-08-13
Regulation and Innovation Revisited: How Restrictive Environments Can Promote Destabilizing New Technologies
Previous literature offers conflicting findings on how the restrictiveness of the regulatory environment—the amount of rules that prohibit specific activities—affects innovation of firms. One camp suggests that restrictiveness circumscribes the range of available technological components and therefore decreases innovation. The other camp believes that restrictiveness can lead firms to seek new alt…
News articles
· 2024-08-12
Ranking Regulatory Burdens
With this in mind, I was very interested to see that Patrick McLaughlin and Dustin Chambers have a new report from the Mercatus Center that assesses states based on the the number of regulatory restrictions. Here's a map showing the states with the most red tape (dark g
Citing your work
· 2024-07-01
1 BEFORE THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION WASHINGTON, DC 20554
nology] with overregulation is real.”); Patrick McLaughlin and Robert Green, The Unintended Conse-
Openalex Citation
· 2024-06-13
Poverty spells and economic freedom: Canadian evidence
James W. Dean, Vincent Geloso. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 2024
Openalex Citation
· 2024-01-11
The heterogenous effects of a higher volume of regulation: evidence from more than 200k Spanish norms
Openalex Citation
· 2023-09-28
The causal effect of regulation on income inequality across the U.S. states
News articles
· 2023-09-25
Illinois can fight poverty by reducing excessive regulations that limit jobs
The Illinois Policy article cites Mercatus Center analysis on federal regulation and poverty in Illinois, directly matching McLaughlin's Work 26 on regulation and poverty; the article is by Joe Tabor (Illinois Policy), not McLaughlin, making it a policy organization citation of his research.
Openalex Citation
· 2023-09-19
The heterogenous effects of regulatory complexity: Evidence from more than 200k Spanish norms
Abstract We analyze the impact of regulatory complexity on economic activity and its heterogeneous impact on firms. We use a novel database that classifies more than 200,000 regulations adopted in Spain between 1995 and 2020. Exploiting this rich database, we are able to estimate the exposure to regulatory complexity of industries located in different Spanish sub-national regions. We find that an …
Openalex Citation
· 2023-08-16
Environmental policy, green trade and sustainable development in Europe: New perspective on the Porter hypothesis
Godwin Olasehinde‐Williams, Folorunsho M. Ajide. Energy & Environment. 2023
Openalex Citation
· 2023-06-12
ADA to Ph.D.? The Americans with disabilities act and post-secondary educational attainment
Nicholas Reinarts, Vitor Melo. Public Choice. 2023
News articles
· 2023-05-18
Options to Encourage Small Business Health Coverage Offerings - AAF
The page is a policy brief by Jackson Hammond (not McLaughlin) published by the American Action Forum; it cites a 2022 Mercatus Center study in passing, but McLaughlin is neither the author nor the subject of this article.
Openalex Citation
· 2023-04-11
Sector-level economic effects of regulatory complexity: evidence from Spain
This paper studies for the first time the impact on various measures of economic efficiency of regulatory complexity by sector in Spain. We base our analysis on an innovative database that classifies 206,777 regulations by economic sector and region, which highlights the growing volume of regulation, as well as its diversity by sector, region and business cycle stage. This analysis first looks at …
Openalex Citation
· 2022-12-29
Analysis of Poverty Determinants in The Bali Province 2015-2020
Resky Tri Nur Said, Gatot Sasongko. Media Trend. 2022
Openalex Citation
· 2022-11-30
Barriers to entry, entrepreneurship and income inequality within the USA
Purpose Cross-country studies have shown that higher costs to starting a business tend to reduce entrepreneurship (Chambers and Munemo, 2019) and that an unfavorable environment for business can increase poverty and income inequality (Chambers et al. , 2019a; Djankov et al. , 2018). Building on the current literature, the authors test whether barriers to starting a business at the state and city l…
Openalex Citation
· 2022-03-22
«Регуляторная гильотина» в России и ее количественные результаты
Статья посвящена реализации в России механизма «регуляторной гильотины», в рамках которой в 2020 году произошла массовая отмена нормативных правовых актов, содержащих обязательные требования и вступивших в силу до 1 января 2020 года. В статье раскрываются понятие и процедура реализации такого механизма, а также приводятся его результаты. Целью исследования являлась оценка итогов «регуляторной гиль…
Openalex Citation
· 2022-03-22
«Регуляторная гильотина» в России и ее количественные результаты
Alexander Knutov, Sergey Plaksin, Ruslan Sinyatullin, Alexander Chaplinsky. Law Journal of the Higher School of Economics. 2022
Openalex Citation
· 2022-01-01
Barriers to Entry, Entrepreneurship, and Income Inequality within the United States
Colin O’Reilly. SSRN Electronic Journal. 2022
Openalex Citation
· 2021-12-09
Drafting “better regulation”: The economic cost of regulatory complexity
Different public agencies are seeking to draft “better regulation”. Complex or poorly drafted norms are more difficult for economic agents to implement, tending to erode economic efficiency. The literature has so far concentrated on the analysis of regulatory complexity as a phenomenon related to the “quantity” of norms. This article guides the process of adopting new regulations, taking into acco…
Openalex Citation
· 2021-08-31
Regulation and income inequality in the United States
Openalex Citation
· 2021-08-13
The economic theory of regulation and inequality
Public comments
· 2021-07-07
Comment submitted by Americans for Prosperity (AFP)
Source: regs_supercorpus
Docket: EPA-HQ-OAR-2021-0044
Posted: 2021-07-07
--- excerpt (chunk 1/1) ---
July 6, 2021
Administrator Michael Regan
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20460
RE: Phasedown of Hydrofluorocarbons: Establishing the Allowance Allocation and
Trading Program Under the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act
Dea…
Openalex Citation
· 2021-06-23
Federal Regulation and Mortality in the 50 States
Previous research speculates that some regulations are counterproductive in the sense that they increase (rather than decrease) mortality risk. However, few empirical studies have measured the extent to which this phenomenon holds across the regulatory system as a whole. Using a novel U.S. state panel data set spanning the period 2000-2014, we estimate the effect of U.S. federal regulation on stat…
Semantic Scholar
· 2021-02-09
New Dimensions of Regulatory Complexity and Their Economic Cost. An Analysis Using Text Mining
Complex or poorly drafted regulations are more difficult for economic agents to implement, eroding economic efficiency. The literature has so far concentrated on the analysis of regulatory complexity as a phenomenon related to the “quantity” of norms. Regulation can also be complex because of “qualitative” reasons such as its linguistic ambiguity or its relational structure (references between leg…
Openalex Citation
· 2021-01-01
Toward a Formalization of Policy Analytics
Semantic Scholar
· 2020-12-04
Влияние регуляторной жесткости нормативно-правовой базы на динамику бедности в регионах России
Openalex Citation
· 2020-12-04
Impact of regulatory framework rigidity on poverty in the regions of Russia
The paper analyzes the impact of the federal regulatory burden on poverty dynamics in Russia. The paper provides regional level indices of the federal regulatory burden on the economy in 2008—2018 which take into account sectoral structure of regions’ output and the level of regulatory rigidity of federal regulations governing certain types of economic activity. Estimates of empirical specificatio…
Openalex Citation
· 2020-09-16
The political economy of Australian regulatory reform
Abstract The problem of regulatory accumulation has increasingly been recognised as a policy problem in its own right. Governments have then devised and implemented regulatory reform policies that directly seek to ameliorate the burdens of regulatory accumulation (e.g. red tape reduction targets). In this paper we examine regulatory reform approaches in Australia through the lens of policy innovat…
Openalex Citation
· 2020-07-25
The effects of federal regulations on corruption in U.S. States
Oguzhan C. Dincer, Burak Günalp. European Journal of Political Economy. 2020
Citing your work
· 2020-04-29
Confronting the Administrative State - Goldwater Institute
15Patrick McLaughlin, “Comparing Regulations Across U.S.
Semantic Scholar
· 2020-04-15
A Fresh Start: How to Address Regulations Suspended During the Coronavirus Crisis
As the COVID-19 crisis intensified, policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels started suspending or rescinding laws and regulations that hindered sen
Citing your work
· 2020-04-01
Confronting-the-Administrative-State_web.pdf
15. Patrick McLaughlin, “Comparing Regulations Across U.S. States,” · Mercatus Center, August 7, 2018, https:// www.mercatus.org/ publications/regulation/comparing-regulations-across-us-states · 16. See, e.g., Sackett v. EPA, 566 U.S. 120 (2012). 17. Chevron, U.S.A., Inc.
News articles
· 2020-03-16
Will concerns over Coronavirus lead to a state price-gouging law?
The page is an opinion article by Tom Steward about price-gouging laws; it mentions the Mercatus Center (McLaughlin's affiliation) only in passing as a source for a housing zoning quote, not discussing McLaughlin's research or work on regulation.
News articles
· 2020-03-10
Inside (another) failed attempt to reform health care facility approvals in Virginia • Virginia Mercury
Virginia Mercury news article quotes Matt Mitchell from Mercatus Center at George Mason University discussing his extensive research on COPN, and references his 2016 working paper on COPN's effects on healthcare prices and access, but no specific work from the provided list is cited.
Semantic Scholar
· 2019-12-07
A call for institutional analysis: practicing polycentric political economy in policy research
News articles
· 2019-07-28
This Silly Study on Trade Is Not from the Onion – AIER
The page is an opinion article BY Donald J. Boudreaux (not Patrick A. McLaughlin) published on AIER's Daily Economy; while McLaughlin is affiliated with Mercatus Center (also mentioned in Boudreaux's affiliation block), this article contains no substantive reference to McLaughlin or his research.
Citing your work
· 2019-07-15
BACKGROUNDER No. 3420 | July 10, 2019
Dustin Chambers, Patrick A. McLaughlin, and Laura Stanley, “Regulation and Poverty: An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between the
Openalex Citation
· 2019-05-30
Heterodox Economics, Social Ethics, and Inequalities
Christina McRorie. Journal of Religious Ethics. 2019
News articles
· 2019-01-08
The story behind the certificate of need: What it is, why it exists, and why it has been a thorn in Virginia's side for decades • Virginia Mercury
This is a news article by Katie O'Connor that quotes Matthew Mitchell (identified as a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University) discussing COPN research, but Mitchell is not the author of this page and none of his specific listed works are cited or attributed in the article.
Citing your work
· 2019-01-03
Can and Should the Federal Judiciary Rein In Our Expansive Administrative State?
at 68-70. [31]   Id. at 72-74. [32]   Id. at 77-108. [33]   Id. at 81. [34]   Id. at 79. [35]   Id. at 86-88, 90-91. [36]   Id. at 102-105. [37]   Id. at 92-95 (citing Bentley Coffey, Patrick A. McLaughlin, and Pietro Peretto, The Cumulative Cost of Regulations, Mercatus Working Paper, April 2016, https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/Coffey-Cumulative-Cost-Regs-…
News articles
· 2018-10-17
Report: Illinois’ budget health is the worst in the nation
The page cites a Mercatus Center study on Illinois fiscal health (McLaughlin's affiliated institution), but McLaughlin is not the author of this Illinois Policy article—it is bylined to Adam Schuster and discusses the Mercatus report as a source without identifying McLaughlin as the study's author.
Openalex Citation
· 2018-07-02
A process perspective on regulation: Who bears the dispersed costs of regulation?
Diana W. Thomas. The Review of Austrian Economics. 2018
News articles
· 2018-05-02
Legalize flight-sharing: Europe did it and so can we
The article is a USA Today opinion piece BY Christopher Koopman (not Patrick A. McLaughlin); it mentions McLaughlin's affiliation (Mercatus Center) only in passing to credit Koopman's work, not as substantive citation to McLaughlin's own research or writing.
Openalex Citation
· 2018-01-15
Banking regulation, regulatory capture and inequality
G.P. Manish, Colin O’Reilly. Public Choice. 2018
News articles
· 2016-05-20
New FDA Rules Will List Added Sugars on Nutrition Labels, Alter Serving Size
The article cites Sherzod Abdukadirov from Mercatus Center, not Patrick A. McLaughlin; this is a different scholar and not relevant to the target scholar's work.
News articles
ABC Bias An #honestmistake
The IPA (Institute of Public Affairs, Australian think-tank) article cites research from the Mercatus Center published in Public Choice magazine that documents a relationship between federal regulation and poverty rates—matching work 26 (Regulation and Poverty).
Wikipedia
Regulation
of Africa's political regimes". V-Dem Working Paper 56 (2017). "QuantGov". quantgov.org. Retrieved June 4, 2023. "Code of Federal Regulations, Total
News articles
Patrick A. McLaughlin
This is McLaughlin's Google Scholar profile page listing his publications and citations; it is a directory/profile page about him rather than substantive writing by or about him, so while relevant to the scholar, it does not constitute his own original work or a third-party citation to a specific work.