¿Cómo afecta la complejidad de la regulación a la demografía empresarial?evidencia para España

Zusammenfassung

The volume and fragmentation of regulation are important for business demography. They may imply that the market is divided, reducing firm size and their chances of benefiting from economies of scale. This paper has two objectives: it analyzes the results of a new database on regulation in Spain and explores the impacts of the complexity of the regulatory framework on business demography. The volume of new norms enacted in Spain has increased by four-fold since the end of the 70s, reaching 11,737 regulations in 2018. The results of our analysis indicate that the complexity of the regulatory framework, broken down at the local level, is negatively related to the total number of firms in Spain and to firm entry (reducing the capital of the new firms). This conclusion hides an interesting composition effect: the complexity is negatively related to the presence of limited liability companies (SL), which have a larger size and could take advantage of economies of scale (doing business throughout the territory). However, it is positively related to the presence of individuals with business activity (which are smaller) and which may have activities connected with local regulations and local markets. The analysis proposed in this paper is relevant for the study of productivity in Spain.