Is the distribution of the burden of government regulation unequal across firms? Do regulatory compliance costs fall disproportionately on small businesses relative to others? We quantify firms’ regulatory compliance costs from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor spending to adhere to government rules. Detailed establishment-level occupation microdata, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment’s wage bill owing to employees engaged in regulatory compliance. On average, regulatory costs account for 1.34% to 3.33% of firms’ total wage bill, totaling up to $239 billion in 2014 and $289 billion when also accounting for capital. Our findings reveal an inverted-U relation between firms’ regulatory compliance costs and their employment size, with firms of around 500 employees experiencing about 40% higher compliance cost than small or large firms. Finally, we develop an instrumental variable methodology for decoupling the role of regulatory requirements from that of enforcement in driving changes in compliance costs for firms.

This article presents a discussion of recent methodological innovations in the area of cost and benefit assessment of government regulation, in both a prospective and retrospective sense. Much of the extant progress is presented on the front of private costs of compliance. Private benefits, social costs, and social benefits remain much less systematically organized and more arduous to quantitatively assess, mostly due to the difficulty of standardizing equilibrium counterfactuals. We offer a discussion of potential future methodological improvements in cost-benefit analysis.

Populist politicians have leveraged direct connections with voters to win elections worldwide, often using emotional rather than policy appeals. Do these forms of campaigning work for programmatic politicians as well? We partner with a mainstream opposition political party to implement a field experiment during the 2019 Philippine Senatorial election to test the effectiveness of: (i) direct in-person appeals providing policy information; (ii) the addition of an activity designed to engender positive emotion. We show that direct engagement providing policy information increases vote share for the party, even in a clientelistic context. Additionally, while the emotional activity increases engagement with the campaign in the short term, the information-only treatment was more effective. Last, we present evidence that the treatments operated through learning and persuasion channels: treated voters were more likely to know the party, more certain about their knowledge, and gave higher ratings to the party’s quality and proposed policies.