First of I have to congratulate you on a very well-written paper and interesting research project. The application of economic theories to existing legislation and proposal is very insightful. The insights from the cases you study shows, how policies might fail to provide the intended incentives to reach their respective goals. Therefore I think that your study has a lot of potential. In the following, I try to give you some ideas and feedback which hopefully help to improve your analysis.

I first observation is that in the abstract and in the introduction, it does not exactly become clear to the reader where you want to go with regard to your methodology applied. To my understanding, you want to study what the impact of regulations on economic growth is. Your central argument is that efficiency (i.e. efficient allocation of resources and efficient coordination of producers and consumers) is supposed to lead to more economic growth. This argument is made at page 4 (efficiency leads to growth). Here it would be nice to see additional explanations and sources and also some more empirical evidence for this argument. With regards to intellectual property right (patent rights) Vincenco de Nicolo has done considerable research which might be worthwhile to look at. With regards to your arguments and reviews of fiscal federalism, you might want to have a look at the work of Timothy Besley, Stephen Coate and
Jonathan Rodden (who did some work on the redistributive effects of federal grants, which you raise in later parts of the paper).

Overall you present different strains of Law and Econ scholarship: Tort Law and Econ, IP Law and Econ, Fiscal Federalism (in later parts of the paper). I found it sometimes a bit confusing to follow how each are linked to each other. Maybe the paper could be improved by focussing on only a few areas. Also, at some point there is a discussion about equality, which I think is difficult to reconcile within a paper focussing on economic efficiency. At least some more literature is needed to make this discussion more clear. At page 15, where you discuss the links of econ. efficiency and minimum wages (etc) some empirical evidence would be nice.

Additionally in the beginning of the paper, on page 4, you argue that all Monopolies lead to inherent inefficiency. That is not entirely correct. With regard to natural monopolies where fixed costs are high, granting a monopoly to one producer might decrease the per unit cost of production and therefore increase consumer (and producer) welfare. Also for your argument about patents which do lead to less innovation than would be efficient, it would be nice to see some more empirical evidence.

A last observation is that in your respective case studies you present, the link to the respective theories could be done in a clearer and more consistent way.

Overall the paper and its underlying ideas have a lot of potential. I think limiting its scope and reducing the number of perspectives you take would allow to be more precise and to elaborate more on the respectives arguments. I hope these ideas will be helpful to you.

Best wishes,

Joe

Hi, Renny.
Thank you for your comment!
What we usually see is that there isn’t a good legislative impact assessment for new legislation and, because of this lack, sometimes we get bad regulation. When it happens, I agree with you that an ex post evaluation is the solution to correct problems.
Best regards
Fernando