The Cumulative Cost of Regulations

Here is a link to a working paper by Cffey, McLaughlin, and Peretto titled "The Cumulative Cost of Regulations".

Here are the key findings, which do not surprise me.

Economic growth in the United States has, on average, been slowed by 0.8 percent per year since 1980 owing to the cumulative effects of regulation:

If regulation had been held constant at levels observed in 1980, the US economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it actually was as of 2012.

 
This means that in 2012, the economy was $4 trillion smaller than it would have been in the absence of regulatory growth since 1980.

 
This amounts to a loss of approximately $13,000 per capita, a significant amount of money for most American workers.