The pandemic of COVID-19 has created a significant strain on the healthcare system in the United States. As the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to spread, these numbers are only expected to increase, and with that so does the potential to overwhelm the US healthcare system.American...

The United States faces a forecast of continuing growth in the demand for health care and an insufficient supply of primary care physicians to meet this need. The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA) grant pharmacies the ability to apply for a waiver (CLIA waiver) to perform...

Occupational licensing laws can allow professionals to extract rents in the marketplace. In the case of vision services, optometrists have the authority to write prescriptions for contact lenses. Optometrists may choose to conceal this information and force patients to purchase lenses from the...

For researchers of state regulatory policy, the difficulty of gathering data has long presented an obstacle. This study compares two new databases for state-level occupational licensing laws. The Knee Center for the Study of Occupational Regulation (CSOR) database uses traditional manual reading...

Massage therapy is widely licensed by the states. However, municipalities also often passed massage therapist licensing, motivated by preventing prostitution. Using a novel dataset on municipal licensing and crime data from the FBI, we test if local massage therapist licensing reduced...

Occupational licensing laws can create monopoly power for professionals in the marketplace. In the case of vision services, optometrists have the authority to write prescriptions for contact lenses, and this can result in professionals excluding information to force patients to purchase lenses...