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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.

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 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.

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.

Business ethics has become a controversial topic as China integrates more closely into the world economy and there are signs of convergence within global professions. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to study guanxi and business ethics in China within the context of social capital development, with a view to creating a more balanced interpretation that provides insights for Westerners wishing to conduct business in China.

In terms of methodology, the work is based on the results of a recent survey conducted among Chinese executives in southern China.

The major findings suggest that the processes of developing social capital and the nurturing of company‐to‐company relationships need to be planned carefully. Thus, no one individual should be responsible for the China connection, although the appointment of a team leader is essential, otherwise the Chinese side would become confused. Negotiations always are to be conducted on a team basis and always approved at the highest levels in the corporate structure.

The limitations of this paper include the difficulties of obtaining any research sample in China. Thus, we refer to the work of Weiss, (Learning From Strangers, Free Press, New York.) and use a snowball sample.

The practical implications of the paper are that guanxi (a type of social capital), can be managed and that corruption does not have to result from the use of guanxi‐based relationships. Thus, the originality arises out of the practical implications, in that for the first time, Western concepts of social capital and Asian concepts of guanxi have been compared, leading to practical recommendations for Western managers.

The purpose of this study is to explore how effective new venture teams are developed in venture creation programmes.

This paper presents a multiple case study focusing on the development of effective new venture teams. Semi-structured interviews with 15 new venture teams from two different venture creation programmes were conducted and an abductive analysis approach was used.

Three key phases of the development of an effective new venture team are identified: (1) establishing a foundation for collaboration, (2) structuring the teamwork and (3) adapting to changes. Key activities undertaken by effective new venture teams in each phase are explicated. The findings suggest that new venture teams that are able to establish a foundation for team collaboration and teamwork structuring have the capacity to persevere through the challenges inherent in emerging ventures.

This study offers a much-needed practical perspective about how effective new venture teams are developed in venture creation programmes, and how venture creation programme educators can facilitate the development of effective new venture teams. For educators, these findings provide important insights about team-based learning in entrepreneurship education.

Oral history collections can offer a wealth of detailed information for entrepreneurship researchers. The stories that entrepreneurs tell provide researchers with insight into both perspective and into substantive issues of entrepreneurial behavior. The life stories of entrepreneurs offer students of entrepreneurship insight into both the explicit and the tacit knowledge of working entrepreneurs.

In this paper we rethink the conventional ways of explaining the change process of new company formation. We base our analysis on two well established and dominating categories of entrepreneurship models, stages inspired models and interactive contingency models, and we argue that these do not sufficiently conspire to capture the entrepreneurial start‐up process as an everyday phenomenon of multi‐dimensional individual, social, and environmental interaction. In an effort to address this hypothesized theoretical gap, we apply ideas origination from Symbolic Interactionism to suggest a complementary conceptual model for comprehending the entrepreneurial process as an interactive construct. From here the idea of entrepreneurship as an ongoing “Social Journey of Opportunity Construction” arises. We argue that this idea has a potential impact on the practice of research, since it encourages scholars to step out of predictable zones of positivist research and enter a riskier research zone in which it is everyday interaction that makes the entrepreneurial process emerge.