The scope and scale of occupational licensing in the United States continues to grow. Our study finds that stricter optician licensing laws and laws that have been in place for longer periods of time result in higher optician earnings. On the other hand, there is little evidence that licensing...

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 in the US has grown rapidly in recent decades. Over most of this period, there has been little concern over, and scant legislative attention directed to, this phenomenon. Recently, however, concerns have arisen about the extent, the costs, and the job-destroying nature...

We analyze the effect that state licensing of radiologic technologists (RTs) has had upon RT wages with a unique dataset that allows us to control for place of work and job specialization. Using OLS and several measures of licensing, we find evidence that RTs working in states with licensing...