Here is the February 2015 edition of the most-downloaded recent papers (those announced in the last 60 days) from SSRN’s U.S. Administrative Law eJournal, which is edited by William Funk. For more on why SSRN and this eJournal are such terrific resources for administrative law scholars and practitioners, check out my first post on the subjecthere. You can check out the full rankings, updated daily, here.

Coming in as the most-downloaded recent paper is Is Regulation to Blame for the Decline in American Entrepreneurship? by Nathan Goldschlag and Alexander T. Tabarrok. Using data from the Statistics of U.S. Businesses with RegData to assess how regulation has affected entrepreneurial activity and dynamism, they conclude that “regulation has had little to no effect on declining dynamism.”

Next is one of the two top-five holdovers from January: Jonas Heese’s Government Preferences and SEC Enforcement. In this paper, Heese examines the role of political pressure on SEC enforcement actions, finding among other things that “voters’ interests drive political pressure on SEC enforcement — independent of firms’ lobbying for their special interests.”

Next is a provocative article, entitled Toward a Pigovian State, by Jonathan S. Masur and Eric A. Posner, which is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. As Professor Posnerexplains on his blog, “[i]t is well-known that Congress and regulators do not use Pigovian taxes in order to deter pollution and other negative externalities. It is less well-known, or perhaps not known at all, that regulators possess the authority to impose Pigovian taxes. They just don’t use it. Why not? My colleague Jonathan Masur and I document the regulatory landscape and try to answer this question.”

The next article is the other holdover from last month: Private Enforcement’s Pathways: Lessons from Qui Tam Litigation by David Freeman Engstrom, which was published in the Columbia Law Review. The article builds on Professor Engstrom’s prior work in this area and presents the findings of Professor Engstrom’s review of some 6,000 qui tam lawsuits. Kate Greenwood has a great write-up on the article here, and Kathleen Boozang has a terrific Jotwell review of the first three articles in this series.

Rounding out the top five is Josh Blackman’s The Constitutionality of DAPA Part II: Faithfully Executing the Law, which is forthcoming in the Texas Review of Law & Politics. This essay builds on Professor Blackman’s prior essay forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal Online and continues his argument that the Obama Administration’s immigration executive action is unconstitutional.

And here is the rest of the top ten:

6. Arrests as Regulation by Eisha Jain (Stanford Law Review forthcoming) [CJW: I blogged about this article here.]

7. Parole Release Hearings: The Fallacy of Discretion by R. Kyle Alagood (Thurgood Marshall School of Law Gender, Race and Justice Law Journal forthcoming 2015)

8. Prizes! Innovating, Risk Shifting, and Avoiding Contracts and Grants by Steven L. Schooner& Nathaniel E. Castellano (The Public Manager 2014)

9. Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Legal Complexity by J. B. Ruhl & Daniel Martin Katz(Iowa Law Review forthcoming)

10. Judicial Capacity and Executive Power by Andrew Coan & Nicholas Bullard

Thanks to my terrific research assistant Molly Werhan for helping put together this monthly post. I’ll report back at the start of April with the next edition.