Nick Langston

This paper presents causal evidence on how regulatory compliance burdens affect academic research. I exploit the 1991 Common Rule, which differentially increased researchers’ exposure to institutional review board oversight. I classify publications as human subjects (HS) or non-human subjects at scale with supervised machine-learning, and I use these classifications to measure researchers’ exposure to the policy shift in terms of baseline propensity to produce HS work. Matched difference-in-differences results indicate that exposed US researchers’ probability of publishing any HS work in a given year declines by 5.6 percentage points (compared to a pre-period treatment group mean of 37.5%), and the effect is nearly twice as large for researchers at R2 institutions as at R1 institutions, consistent with greater researcher-borne administrative burdens at less-resourced institutions. The effect is larger among researchers more specialized in HS research at baseline and substantially weaker in a non-US placebo sample. I find little evidence of effects on HS publication counts or overall publication counts, implying that the increase in regulatory compliance requirements led to HS research becoming more concentrated among a smaller set of researchers. More broadly, the results suggest that increased regulatory compliance burdens can change who participates in a regulated activity even when aggregate measures of that activity see little change.