As the amount of regulation continues to increase and private security firms play a more and more vital role in a modern society’s security, policy makers and practitioners acknowledge the need for sound research. Moreover, studying regulation and private security industry dynamics can enable a better alignment of regulation to its objectives, namely to control abusive and corrupt conduct of some private security companies and to improve the professionalism of the industry. Using novel data on the width and the restrictiveness of private security regulation and data on firm birth rate, firm death rate and firm survival rate, an instrumental variable approach is employed in a panel data random effect models, covering the period from 2013 to 2017. [---]