reference library

Is government guiding the invisible hand at the top of the labor market? We study this question among physicians, the most common occupation among the top one percent of income…
Read more

The COVID‐19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the world economy as shelter‐in‐place regulations forced individuals to stay at and work from home. Brick and mortar testing centers, whether run as part…
Read more

We show that occupational licensing has significant negative effects on labor market fluidity defined as cross-occupation mobility. Using a balanced panel of workers constructed from the CPS and SIPP data,…
Read more

“Despite research indicating that health, cost, and quality of care outcomes in midwife-led maternity care are comparable with and in some case preferable to those for patients with physician-led care,…
Read more

This article uses data from the Current Population Survey to analyze the role of professional certifications and occupational licenses in the U.S. labor market. It discusses the prevalence of these…
Read more

A growing body of evidence shows that areas with robust primary care systems tend to have better outcomes and lower per capita costs than areas that rely more on specialists….
Read more

Howell, Baker, Glyn, and Schmitt (HBGS) challenge the consensus view (the “orthodox” view, as they call it) on the causes of European unemployment trends. Numerous papers in this literature examine…
Read more

The term “free trade” has been grossly misused in trade debates. Free trade has generally meant removing barriers on trade in goods, the effect of which is to put downward…
Read more

Pharmacists have been prescribing in the UK since 2003, following the success of nurse prescribing. The review of prescribing, supply and administration of medicines (the second Crown Report) in 1999…
Read more

In this policy brief, we use a novel dataset generated using OL RegData to explore differences in the stringency of occupational licensing for select states in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic…
Read more

COVID-19 and our response have caused economic disruption, forcing businesses to close and millions to become unemployed. Although we have seen some recovery, the number of people currently unemployed remains…
Read more

Arkansas policy makers are aware of their state’s high criminal recidivism rates (the percentage of released prisoners that reoffend). The criminal justice reforms in Arkansas have also indicated that policy…
Read more

Occupational licensing laws create minimum standards that individuals must meet to work in a number of fields. These minimum standards usually include competency tests, hours of practice, application fees, and…
Read more

Our aim in conducting the State Medical Boards Awareness Study was to measure national awareness of state medical boards, as well as gain insights on Americans’ experiences with, and responses…
Read more

Political leadership from the governor was one of the strongest factors influencing whether or not licensing was reformed. Governors accomplished this in a myriad of ways. Both Michigan Governor Rick…
Read more

For the past few decades, the United States has not produced enough primary care physicians. Moreover, too few physicians practice in rural and medically underserved areas, and the number of…
Read more

This article uses data from the Current Population Survey to analyze the role of professional certifications and occupational licenses in the U.S. labor market. It discusses the prevalence of these…
Read more

The criminal justice system is becoming automated. At every stage, from policing to evidence to parole, machine learning and other computer systems guide outcomes. Widespread debates over the pros and…
Read more

The District of Columbia has many factors in its favor making it attractive to workers: high average wages, a variety of employer benefits, strong worker protections, and relatively short commute…
Read more

The paper looks at whether the propensity of young people to follow the same career path as one of their parents is driven by privileges of position arising from regulation…
Read more

As a type of occupational regulation, licensure is intended to protect the public by ensuring that practitioners possess the required knowledge and skills to safely perform their craft. Unlike certifications,…
Read more

Licensing of the health professions is an issue of public policy which has been under fire for years. Economists argue that licensing stifles competition and increases health care costs. Manpower…
Read more

Instead of vetting physicians, the licensing apparatus provides an avenue for professional influence that has been used to restrict entry, limit competition, and preclude innovation in the provision of health…
Read more

The percentage of the workforce affected by occupational licensing has grown nationally and in public education. In assessing educational attainment and quality, there is little evidence that licensing has improved…
Read more

No attempt has been made herein to explore exhaustively the countless number of restrictions which operate to harass the life of the small business man, regardless of his calling. But…
Read more

Unfortunately, I don’t expect the federal bureaucracy to usher in the reign of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School economics. But the federal regulatory process would likely pay less heed to local…
Read more

The dark side of occupational licensing—its tendency to raise prices to consumers with dubious effects on service quality, its enormous payout to licensees, and its ability to shut many willing…
Read more

[T]he purported benefits of occupational licensing requirements — particularly those imposed by active market participants — often fail to come to fruition in practice. This is not entirely surprising, given…
Read more

The authors note that while they may have missed some examples, especially since there is no single authoritative source on de-licensing, it is clear that de-licensing is uncommon, hard to…
Read more

As noted in our introduction, it was often difficult or impossible to obtain data on cases of sexual abuse in medicine. States should make board documents open access. Several states…
Read more

Nurse practitioners (NPs) are capable of analyzing the regulation of their practice by state authorities. The annotated nursing statute, the medicine and pharmacy statutes, regulations from those three boards and…
Read more

The purpose of this article is to examine important elements of the decision of whether and how counselling should be regulated by statute. First, the current status of certification, registration,…
Read more

Licensing describes the set of regulations that limit service provision to individuals or entities who meet state-established criteria. Despite claims that licensure increases service quality, the effect of licensure on…
Read more

Self-regulation encompasses a wide range of arrangements, from private ordering without resort to legal rules to state-enforced systems of delegated rules. Transaction cost analysis has been used to explain how…
Read more

Only the correlation between the median year of licensing and the percentage of an occupation belonging to its association supports the profit hypothesis. This could, of course, be the result…
Read more

Although the topic of state licensing has received voluminous exposure, city occupational licensing remains a part of the law that has been hurriedly bypassed. A closer look at this level…
Read more

Occupational licensing has been justifiable in the view of legislatures on the grounds that it protects the public interest; often, however, it is the producers of the good or service…
Read more

In a recent case (Gibson u. Berryhill 1973) the [Supreme] Court had the opportunity to review occupational licensing. In this case a group of licensed optometrists sought to prevent charges…
Read more

To examine the hypothesis that occupational licensure is primarily a restrictive device to protect those licensed from competition, analysis focused on the licensure of non-professional occupations in Rhode Island, Massachusetts,…
Read more

Empowered by the state legislatures and aligned with the profession they oversee, dental licensing boards inhibit competition through restrictive licensing practices. In the manner of a cartel, most boards have…
Read more

I consider markets with asymmetric information. As suggested by Akerlof, quality deterioration in such markets may take place. I show that this is a general phenomenon. Minimum quality constraints (or…
Read more

Occupational licensure can be approached within a framework of basic economics. The people of every country produce and consume diverse commodities and services. This mixed bag—the economy’s output—is produced by…
Read more

To summarize, the empirical tests used in this study have found no support for the contention that physicians were initially regulated at the behest of the general population. Rather, empirical…
Read more

To summarize, the empirical tests used in this study have found no support for the contention that physicians were initially regulated at the behest of the general population. Rather, empirical…
Read more

The economic theory of regulation suggests that occupational licensing laws are enacted and administered to advance the interests of licensed practitioners. For example, grading standards on licensing examinations could be…
Read more

It should be noted parenthetically that, while licensing causes the mean quality of legal practitioners to rise, by excluding those at the lower part of the qualitative range who could…
Read more

Current statutes grant broad, near-exclusive scopes of practice to a few professions and “carved-out” scopes for the remaining professions. These laws erect unreasonable barriers to high-quality and affordable care.The need…
Read more

Recent upheavals within health care delivery, technological advances, and changing attitudes among consumers have challenged and changed health professions licensure. At the same time, traditional regulatory frameworks remain in place….
Read more

Licensing confers a special authority, both literally and figuratively, which increases the likelihood of dependency on licensed personnel. The inequality of information available to the public, compared to the professional,…
Read more

This paper explores the origins and effects of occupational licensing regulation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Was licensing regulation introduced to limit competition in the market for…
Read more

Both the Federation [of State Medical Boards] and the American Medical Association offer guidelines on how to deal with ethical behavior issues, but no one entity oversees or mandates how…
Read more

Numerous studies have revealed little, if any, improvement in service quality from compulsory licensing. Oftentimes, licensing laws actually reduce service quality and public safety. There are a number of reasons…
Read more

We show that in both countries occupational licensing has a large impact on wage determination. The wage premium associated with licensing stands at approximately 18 per cent in the US…
Read more

Business enterprises are rarely formed as unionized firms. Similarly, even though occupations develop similar tasks and common procedures for doing a job, they are not begun as licensed occupations. Occupations…
Read more

This paper studies the internal politics of a licensing association with regard to expansion of the licensure and self-regulation. A theoretical model is presented of a professional association that has…
Read more

Occupational licensing is now one of the most widespread and fastest growing forms of labor market regulation. Occupational licensing requirement generally are defended on the ground that they offset the…
Read more

This study examines the scope and burden of occupational licensing laws in the United States for 102 low- and moderate-income occupations. Findings indicate that the licences studied require of aspiring…
Read more

This paper argues that the sharing economy—through the use of the Internet and real time reputational feedback mechanisms—is providing a solution to the lemons problem that many regulators have spent…
Read more

Occupational licensing directly affects nearly 30 percent of U.S. workers today and continues to grow in density and scope. In this article, we identify and analyze those rare instances when…
Read more