Federal Regulation and Mortality in the 50 States

Previous research speculates that some regulations are counterproductive in the sense that they increase (rather than decrease) mortality risk. However, few empirical studies have measured the extent to which this phenomenon holds across the regulatory system as a whole. Using a novel US state panel dataset spanning the period 1995 to 2014, we estimate the impact of US federal regulation on state-level mortality. We find that a 1 percent increase in binding federal regulations increases our mortality index by between 0.53 and 1.35 percent. These findings are highly robust to the form of mortality measure, choice of covariates, and the inclusion/exclusion of various regions and states. This paper therefore fills an important gap in the empirical literature and boosts the credibility of mortality risk analysis, whereby public policymakers weigh both the expected lives saved and lost due to a proposed regulation.