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The Gravity Of Legal Diffusion, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Katerina Linos

Faculty Scholarship

A persistent empirical finding is that bilateral trade between two countries is proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We hypothesize that a similar pattern is likely to hold for the diffusion of laws. We specifically argue that countries’ propensity to update their laws to converge with the leading regulator in a given policy area is likely to be proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We then empirically test this theory in the area of antitrust and assess countries’ convergence to the world’s leading antitrust …