This paper examines the contribution of administrative and procedural transaction costs to economic growth under common legal system. We show that administrative and procedural costs vary quite a lot even within the institutional environment sharing the common legal system. States with low‐cost business registration, low‐cost access to property rights and greater judicial efficiency tend to have consistently higher growth. The established effects are robust to alternative model specifications, heterogeneity bias, and to a variety of control variables that might confound the effects of administrative and procedural costs on growth. Such differences in costs are far from being trivial as we show that these within‐system differences might be instrumental in influencing economic growth. Lower administrative and procedural costs induce growth by increasing investment rate, lowering unemployment rate, encouraging labor supply and improving total factor productivity. In the counterfactual scenario, the transition from high‐cost to low‐cost regime is associated with substantial growth and development gains over time. By exploiting the variation in the disease environment, ethnic fractionalization and historical urbanization, we show that the negative effect of rising procedural and administrative costs on growth and development appears to be causal.

中文翻译：

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普通法制度下的交易成本和经济增长：墨西哥的国家级证据

本文研究了普通法制度下行政和程序交易成本对经济增长的贡献。我们证明，即使在共享共同法律制度的制度环境下，行政和程序成本也有很大差异。具有低成本商业登记，低成本获取产权和提高司法效率的国家往往会持续增长。既定的影响对于替代模型规范，异质性偏见以及对可能混淆行政和程序成本对增长的影响的各种控制变量具有鲁棒性。这样的成本差异远非微不足道，因为我们证明了这些系统内差异可能会影响经济增长。较低的行政和程序成本通过增加投资率，降低失业率，鼓励劳动力供应和提高全要素生产率来促进增长。在反事实情况下，随着时间的推移，从高成本体制向低成本体制的转变与可观的增长和发展收益相关。通过利用疾病环境，种族分化和历史城市化的变化，我们表明，程序和行政成本上升对增长和发展的负面影响似乎是因果关系。