Existing measures (e.g., Bartik, Gupta and Milo (2025) and Gyourko, Hartley, and Krimmel (2021)) of regulatory stringency focus on statutory authority; building on recent policy debates, I aim to develop a complementary measure that captures the discretionary authority exercised by local policymakers. I document the existence and economic significance of a distinct class of housing and land-use regulation that operates through case-by-case policymaker discretion — an institutional feature particularly prominent in California’s Bay Area. I measure this by digitizing San Francisco Planning Commission minutes to build a text-based index of discretionary authority at the meeting-project level. With this novel measure, I plan to the mechanisms through which pro-housing state legislation - often aimed at constraining local discretionary authority via streamlining mandates (e.g., SB35 (2017)).

Over the past half-century, numerous transitional justice (TJ) measures have been implemented globally. While much research has examined different TJ modalities in the aftermath of authoritarian rule and armed conflict, a growing body of work recognizes TJ outside of political transitions. We study a noteworthy export from transitional to non-transitional settings: truth commissions. Building on scholarship on TJ in established democracies, we introduce new quantitative data from the Varieties of Truth Commissions Project on truth commissions in an overlooked but significant case: the United States. The data captures 20 past, present and proposed official US truth commissions, most of them at the subnational level. Though their mandates vary considerably, they all address racial injustice, with an emphasis on anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence. We elaborate on trends in the data and discuss the implications for unfolding efforts to reckon with historical and contemporary racial violence and injustice in the United States.