This article aims to describe and analyze the production of empirical research on social and economic regulation in Brazil. The article analyzes the main subjects, research techniques and literature used in this academic work. The article is divided in two sections, in which the first describes and analyzes legal dissertations and theses produced between 1996 and 2016 and the second part analyzes academic articles published in highly scored academic law reviews (A1 and A2). The structure of each section is similar: it provides for a quantitative description of empirical legal research on regulation, followed by an analysis of the main research techniques used in this work. It then proceeds to a bibliometric analysis of this production, identifying their main subjects and their most influential literature. As a general conclusion, the article shows that empirical research on regulatory matters is very incipient. It is modest in numbers and is characterized by methodological and theoretical flaws that contribute to its lower standards.