I became aware only this week of the publication earlier this year of Paul Teske’s book, Regulation in the States, by the Brookings Institution Press. I have not yet read it, and so cannot recommend it to you from that vantage point. However, the abstract looks interesting, I think it might interest a substantial set of Overlawyered readers, and the time of a guest blogger is short. So, here’s a clip from the book’s abstract:

“Regulation in the States provides original quantitative analyses of state-level regulation across all the states in ten important sectors such as telecommunications, electricity, and professional licensing. Each section uses the same template for research and discussion, enabling cross-comparison among industries. Teske finds that commonly held fears of regulatory capture by industry are overblown, as are worries about an inevitable ‘race to the bottom.’ Legislatures and agencies still tend to base their policy decisions on their own ideologies and analysis. Teske also examines important exceptions, however, such as the case of occupational regulation.”

For a short, mostly favorable review by a political scientist, click here.

“Everyone knows” the institution of private proprety is important to a society, but proving just how important has, somewhat surprisingly, been tricky. A new paper by Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Simon Johnson (MIT), and James Robinson (Berkeley), makes the case that “differences in economic institutions appear to be the robust causal factor underlying the differences in income per capita across countries.” (Emphasis added.) The authors define good “economic institutions” as including “enforcement of property rights for a broad cross-section of society so that all individuals have an incentive to invest, innovate and take part in economic activity.” Additionally, there must be “some degree of equality of opportunity in society, including such things as equality before the law, so that those with good investment opportunities can take advantage of them.” In an earlier paper, the authors coined the term “institutions of private property” to cover this idea, and the term “extractive institutions” to cover situations where “the rule of law and property rights are absent for large majorities of the population.”

The paper, Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth, makes fascinating reading, even for a non-economist. It is available for purchase from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER subscribers can download it for free). A less-than-final draft, dated April 29, is also available on Professor Acemoglu’s webpage.