Entry Barriers and Growth

A new paper by Antonio Ciccone (picture) and Elias Papaioannou looks at the link between entry regulation and growth. Or, more precisely, between entry regulation and the intersectoral reallocation of resources in the presence of economic shocks. Here is how the authors describe it:

"We study how restrictions on firm entry affect intersectoral factor reallocation when open economies experience global economic shocks. In our theoretical framework, countries trade freely in a range of differentiated sectors that are subject to country-specific and global shocks. Entry restrictions are modeled as an upper bound on the introduction of new differentiated goods following shocks. Prices and quantities adjust to clear international goods markets, and wages adjust to clear national labor markets. We show that in general equilibrium, countries with tighter entry restrictions see less factor reallocation compared to the frictionless benchmark. In our empirical work, we compare sectoral employment reallocation across countries in the 1980s and 1990s with proxies for frictionless benchmark reallocation. Our results indicate that the gap between actual and frictionless reallocation is greater in countries where it takes longer to start a firm."

A worthy read. You may also want to read this related paper.