The average US firm spends between 1.3 and 3.3 percent of its total wage bill on regulatory compliance, estimate Francesco Trebbi and Miao Ben Zhang in The Cost of Regulatory Compliance in the United States (NBER Working Paper 30691). This wage bill grew at an annual rate of about 1 percent a year from 2002 to 2014, roughly half of the average annual GDP growth rate over the period. In 2014, the total wage bill devoted to regulatory compliance workers ranged from a conservative estimate...
