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The purpose of this paper is to examine the labor market entry of real estate agents in the USA and the potential effect of occupational licensing on entry.

Data from the 2012 to 2017 American Community Survey are linked to local housing price fluctuations from the Federal Housing Finance Agency for 100 large metro areas. The cost of entry associated with occupational licensing for new real estate agents is carefully measured for each market and interacted with housing fluctuations to investigate the role for barriers to entry.

A 10 percent increase in housing prices is associated with a 4 percent increase in the number of agents. However, increased license stringency reduces the labor market response by 30 percent. The impact of licensing is stronger for women and younger workers.

This work contributes to the growing literature investigating the impact of occupational licensing on labor supply and entry in the USA, as well as potential impacts of regulation on dynamism and entrepreneurship. To the authors’ knowledge, this study is also the first to quantify the cost of occupational licensing in the real estate industry.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how occupational licensing costs within a state affect the performance of self-employed firms, as measured through annual sales.

This study utilizes an empirical approach to determine if there are additional effects on the annual sales for firms that are self-employed in high-cost states that are not explained through the individual estimations. Since the choice of self-employment is plausibly nonrandom, this study also uses a propensity score matching method to develop a matched subsample of self-employed and employee-maintaining firms. This selection methodology ensures that the set of self-employed and employee-maintaining firm observations are similar in all measurable attributes besides their regulatory environment and firm structure. Using this representative subsample, the empirical framework is repeated to reevaluate the effects of high occupational licensing fees on the sales of self-employed firms.

In both the unmatched and matched samples, there are significant, large, negative interactions representing a reduction in annual sales per employee within self-employed firms relative to employee-maintaining firms when located in states with above-average occupational licensing costs. The results using the matched subsamples are noticeably smaller in magnitude, which indicates that future policy assessments would benefit from ensuring that the sample pool, when dealing with self-employment, is limited only to firms under a common convex hull in order to not skew the size of results.

This study contributes new understanding of the financial relationship of self-employed firms and occupational licensing costs using firm-level observations of sales and firm structure. This has important policy implications for the development and evaluation of occupational licensing policies when considering effects on the self-employed.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss new findings on municipal-level occupational licensing and other forms of regulation and introduce a new data set available for researchers to study this largely unexplored area.

Municipal occupational regulatory data were gathered in 2017 and 2018 from the 50 largest cities in the USA. Data available in the data set include city and state IDs, occupational IDs, requirements associated with the regulations (e.g. education, experience and fees), penalties for practicing without meeting the requirements, regulatory type and NAICS category. Descriptive statistics are used to present information about the number and types of occupations regulated and the number and types of regulations present in the cities.

The median number of occupations regulated by a city is 24.5, but the numbers per city vary substantially. The 1,832 occupations in the data set are distributed across every NAICS category. The most prevalent form of regulation is registration; certification is least used. Cities are quite diverse in the types of regulations applied to occupations, and the type of regulation varies substantially by industry type.

Research on licensing is dominated by state-level analyses. Largely absent are systematic analyses of licensing and other regulation at the municipal level, likely due to a lack of data. This means the current licensing literature underestimates – perhaps severely so – the prevalence, burdens and effects of licensing. The data introduced and discussed in this paper can help remedy this dearth of municipal licensing analyses.

This paper aims to discuss a new source of data detailing state level occupational licensing requirements for 50 professions.

This study's research team gathered state level licensing requirements for 50 profession in all 50 states and DC from 2022 to 2023. The authors include the type of regulation, entry requirements like fees, education, training, good moral character provisions and renewal requirements. The authors include Standard Occupational Classification industry codes to allow researchers to merge it with other publicly available data sources. Finally, the authors present descriptive statistics and provide a comparison of licensing requirements for audiologists, an occupation with variation in entry requirements.

The mean number of the 50 professions licensed in states is 36. On average, these professions require a bachelor's degree, $271 in licensing fees and 26 h of continuing education to renew. For the audiologist profession, there is considerable variation between states in entry requirements like fees and education.

Despite a large body of work on occupational licensing, data limitations still exist. Most analysis focuses on whether a profession is licensed or not. However, there is considerable variation between states for the same profession, providing an avenue for work estimating the effects of specific licensing requirements. A new source of data is introduced and discussed for researchers to use in future analyses of occupational licensing.

The case illustrates an entrepreneurial voyage and venture creation and through it helps in identifying the reasons and causes for that venture's failure. It also enables discussion on the importance of planning a venture, more importantly; financing, managing, growing, and ending a venture and on how to avoid the pitfalls that befall such enterprises. This case can be used in Entrepreneurship courses as well as MBA, PGP and Executive Education programmes on Entrepreneurship.

This study aims to analyze the trends for crime and STDs after the passage of massage therapist licensing. In 1977, Texas passed a law permitting county-level licensing laws for massage therapists, which was soon followed by a statewide licensing requirement in 1985. This early massage therapy law was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Massage therapy licensing is commonly associated with preventing crime, specifically prostitution. However, massage parlors also represent an opportunity for entrepreneurs starting businesses, who face significant barriers to entry across the USA.

The authors analyze the effect of state- and city-level licensing of massage therapists on crime and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases using data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports from 1985–2013 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1993-2015.

The authors find that state- and city-level licensing of massage therapists was not associated with preventing crimes related to prostitution or reducing sexually transmitted diseases. This analysis is consistent with the hypothesis that relaxing the stringency of massage therapist licensing would not lead to increases in crime or additional spread of disease while likely encouraging entrepreneurship.

This study is one of the first to examine the effects of city-level licensing on health and safety of consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to document the changes in low- and moderate-income occupational licensing over time.

Using US state level data, the authors document the rise in occupational licensing for low- and moderate-income occupations over the 1993-2012 period.

States averaged 32 additional low- and moderate-income occupations licensed over this period. Louisiana added the most licenses with 59 new licenses for these occupations, while Oklahoma and Kentucky only added 15 licenses for these low- and moderate-income occupations.

These data have not been documented before and should provide useful for future research into occupational licensing.