Prior work has established the negative effects of many regulations on business and policy.These negative effects have been a key driver for many of the so-called better regulation programmes. Despite all efforts, however, deregulation programmes have had inconclusive results and their success remains the subject of ongoing debate. We suggest that the public policy efforts have largely overlooked a business perspective of regulation and its institutional determinants. We argue that the institutional determinants of regulation include the regulation stock, the quality of regulation and the predictability of regulation application. This study is among the first to examine the impact of these institutional determinants on regulatory compliance costs for firms using a unique dataset from companies in OECD countries. Our results convincingly support our approach to the study of regulation.