Search results

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.

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 study is to investigate the extent to which a character component is required for occupational licensing by state, industry and occupation. This study also investigates whether the good moral character (GMC) is defined and how GMC is defined in state statutes. Investigating the GMC requirement is important to society at large because character is a vital factor for trust and trust is an essential component to voluntary exchange and free markets. Investigating the GMC requirement is also important to the thousands of rehabilitated individuals who may be denied work in licensed occupations because of past transgressions.

The quantitative research data were collected from state licensing statutes. The number of licensed occupations within each of the 50 states that require GMC was tabulated, as well as the number of states that require GMC for licensing by industry group. In addition, an occupation that requires GMC in a high number of states was compared to an occupation that requires GMC in a low number of states within 11 industry groups. Finally, regulatory statutes were searched to determine how good moral character is defined by each of the state licensing boards for the select occupations.

This paper reports that the inclusion of a character component within regulatory licensing statutes varies widely by occupation and by state. The number of occupations requiring GMC ranged from 8 to 119 per state. The number of states requiring GMC ranged from 12 to 49 per industry group. Occupations within industry groups that are more frequently licensed are also more likely to require GMC than occupations that are less frequently licensed. Occupations that are more frequently licensed, however, are generally not more likely to define GMC in their regulatory statutes. Only accounting, an occupation that requires GMC in most states, also defines GMC in more states than any of the other select occupations.

Only state regulatory statutes were searched for definitions of GMC. Definitions could be included in other government documents such as rules or regulations. As these additional sources were not searched, the number of states that define GMC for the select occupations cited in this study may be understated.

Prior research has included only studies of the GMC requirement relating to the licensing of attorneys and accountants. The current research explores the extent that good moral character is required for licensing across states, industries and select occupations. This research agrees with prior research that GMC, although providing an important foundation for public trust, is typically not well-defined. To counter criticism of the requirement, this paper concludes with a call for the inclusion of a GMC definition within occupational licensing statutes that is “narrowly and precisely construed, avoiding problems of both vagueness and over breadth” (AICPA and NASBA, 2018).

The purpose of this paper is to present a new data set documenting various costs to starting a business across the 50 US states for the year 2011.

The first ranking weights and organizes measures using principal components analysis. The second ranking averages subcomponents of the data across groups of variables with common themes.

Most states largely maintain their relative position across both Methods 1 and 2 despite the difference in organization and weight of variables and groups across the two ranking methods – 21 of the top 25 states remained in the top 25 in both the Methods 1 and 2 rankings. Some states experience not insignificant changes between the two indexes and a few experience substantial changes. These changes can be attributed to the importance Method 1 places upon final fees, final processing time, and application formats for the Secretary of State.

A lack of empirical evidence, additional data, and a definitive theory on the impacts of barriers to entry measures for the USA constrains both how the data are presented as well as which measures were collected. This paper attempts to accommodate for this by presenting rankings derived from different methodologies.

The composite barriers to entry measures can be used in policy analysis and possible research on rent-seeking. These data can also be used to study the determinants and relative costs of entrepreneurship.

This paper presents entry-specific regulatory measures currently undocumented in the literature.

This study acts as a proof of concept to address how general, broadly applicable barriers to starting a business impact entry across various firm sizes.

The following investigation uses barriers to entry data in Teague (2016) to explore the costs of government intervention within the United States for 2011.

Results from cross sectional regression analysis of business entry rates across nine different business size classifications on a composite barrier to entry variable yield two main findings: (1) increase in barriers to entry decrease business growth for most establishment sizes and (2) increase in barriers to entry for larger firms result in positive entry rates.

This study is the first exploration of general, broadly applicable barriers to entry measures and entry rates. Its preliminary findings suggest that barriers to entry encourage development of larger business sizes at the possible expense of smaller businesses. This result encourages further work into the interconnectedness of government and business.

Collateral consequences (CCs) of criminal convictions such as disenfranchisement, occupational restrictions, exclusions from public housing, and loss of welfare benefits represent one of the salient yet hidden features of the contemporary American penal state. This chapter explores, from a comparative and historical perspective, the rise of the many indirect “regulatory” sanctions flowing from a conviction and discusses some of the unique challenges they pose for legal and policy reform. US jurisprudence and policies are contrasted with the more stringent approach adopted by European legal systems and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in safeguarding the often blurred line between criminal punishments and formally civil sanctions. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to contribute to a better understanding of the overreliance of the US criminal justice systems on CCs as a device of social exclusion and control, and (2) to put forward constructive and viable reform proposals aimed at reinventing the role and operation of collateral restrictions flowing from criminal convictions.

Individuals tend to seek out communities and organizations that appeal to their beliefs and values. They gravitate to positions and responsibilities that suit their personal aspirations and ambitions, and in such pursuits they succeed best. In The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office, Alan Ehrenhalt (1992) argues that the political process tends to select for those who most believe in it and make a career of it. He suggests that one advantage held by the Democratic party (over the Republican party) is that the Democratic party is more thoroughly a party of active government, so it better attracts “people who think running for office is worth the considerable sacrifice it entails” (p. 224). Not only does the political process tend to attract those who believe in it, it also tends to prosper believers.

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.

As the move from the business incubator loomed, Abdul Khan had to decide where his business should relocate to. ACEES Group LLC, a small consulting firm, had grown from three friends working out of Abdul Khan’s house to a 20-person firm generating more than a million dollars in revenue within five years. This growth had necessitated the need for a larger and more prominent place. Although Abdul knew he did not want to renew the lease at the incubator, and he did not want to move his business too far from its current location, but the decision he had to make was whether ACEES Group should lease a commercial place or buy its own property. He was particularly torn because the real estate prices had fallen considerably, and were now on the mend and interest rates were still low.

The primary source of materials in the case was an interview with the owner (pseudo name: Abdul Khan). The owner wishes to remain anonymous. The financial statements of the firm produced in the case have been modified by a fixed factor so as to disguise the actual numbers but not materially alter the information in any fashion. Other secondary sources of materials include information about the business incubator program, the MBE certification and its benefits through the State of Florida, real estate and lease rates in Central Florida and other economic information.

This case is primarily intended for undergraduate students taking a course in entrepreneurship, real estate investments or financial management, with emphasis on real estate valuation, cash flow forecasting and/or valuation of business. Students should be familiar with time value of money concepts, understand the concept of NPV and IRR, and preferably be comfortable in the use of Excel. This instructor manual provides all calculations of space needs analysis, and discounted cash flow analysis for lease vs buy analysis. A few suggestions to discuss qualitative aspects of this decision making are also included.