Stem cell legislation and its impact on the geographic preferences of stem cell researchers

Abstract Proponents describe stem Cell Replacement Therapy and related technologies to be a significant step forward for medicine. However, due the inherent ethical problems in human Embryonic Stem Research (hESC), it is strictly regulated around world. The US has passed at federal state level, both supportive restrictive laws over years. changing legislative environment levels created situation whereby researchers have choose whether where carry out this research. By exploiting temporal spatial heterogeneity shocks, we assess if affected scientists voted with their feet, leaving or country imposing rules hESC research clustered geographically. We find that most of carried states, changes had minor but noticeable effect on relocation choices. Most importantly, moved states. This result suggests several state-level interventions (supportive), which were opposed (restrictive), counteracted each other.