Why Do You Make Things So Complicated? Understanding the Texts of Regulations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract The last two years have been characterized by a considerable increase in the number of national and local regulations to contain and fight the spread of the COVID-19 contagion. The literature suggests that poor readability of regulations comes with a significant cost in terms of public compliance, in various contexts. Does the readability of COVID-19 regulations impact their effectiveness? We study the matter in Italy, a country severely affected by the first wave of COVID-19, and one that has seen many local regulations that have tried to halt the virus. Our empirical evidence, obtained from a corpus built on the basis of all 640 regional COVID-19 regulations that have been published, was collected from the Italian Conference of Regions and Autonomous Provinces between 21 February and 14 June 2020. Our results, obtained through F-GLS estimations with fixed, hybrid, and random effects, suggest that the readability of the regulations affected the spread of the pandemic, and that an improvement in readability would lead to more efficient outcomes.