When is Occupational Closure Not Closure?

• In Event: 228 - Regular Session. Gendered Work and the Wage Gap

Abstract

During the past few decades, licensure, a state-enforced mechanism for regulating occupational entry, quickly became the most prevalent form of occupational closure. Broad consensus among researchers is that licensure creates monopolies by limiting access to the occupation. This article demonstrates that, contrary to established wisdom, licensure does not limit competition, but rather enhances access, particularly for the women and minorities. Results are based on a new occupational dataset, covering thirty years, that exploits interstate variability in licensure across over three hundred census-identified occupations. I argue that occupational closure is more than a barrier to entry. Instead, by altering the group’s composition, it has the potential to create broad cultural changes within an occupation, in ways that fundamentally alter the structure of work and group boundaries.

Author

• Beth Red Bird, Stanford University