In the U.S., occupational licensing is more prevalent in the public sector than in the private sector, but the influence of occupational regulation for public sector workers has not been analyzed in detail. Our study initially examines the probability of a licensed worker selecting into the...

The analysis of occupational licensing has concentrated largely on its labor market and consumer welfare effects. By contrast, relatively little is known about how occupational licensing laws originated or the key factors in their evolution. In this paper, we study the determinants of U.S....

In the United States, licenses are required for entry into many different occupations. Requirements vary by state and occupation, but many licenses require a minimum number of training or instructional hours. We consider the impact of these hours requirements on students and postsecondary...

Optimizing state and regional physician labor supply has been an important policy issue in healthcare in the United States. One of the proposed solutions has been the universal licensing recognition (ULR), which allows out-of-state physicians to provide healthcare services without relicensing...

The nonprofit sector's ability to absorb increases in labor costs differs from the private sector in a number of ways. We analyze how nonprofits are affected by changes in the minimum wage utilizing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Internal Revenue Service, linked to state...

Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We...

This article examines the trends in women's economic outcomes in the United States focusing primarily on labor force participation, occupational attainment, and the gender wage gap. The author first highlights considerable progress on all dimensions prior to the 1990s followed by a slowing or...

Online marketplaces have adopted new quality control mechanisms that can accommodate a flexible pool of providers. In the context of ride-hailing, we measure the effectiveness of these mechanisms, which include ratings, incentives, and behavioral nudges. Using telemetry data as an objective...

We argue that inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians' incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city. We develop a tournament model of project selection that captures the driving...

A classic problem in public finance is the over-expenditure of local governments in expectation of a bailout from higher-level administrations. While monitoring could mitigate agency problems, it can itself be rendered ineffective if auditors are corruptible. I evaluate whether limiting...