The Licensing Racket

The paper The Origins and Evolution of Occupational Licensing in the United States shows that the fields that faced increasing competition from the immigration waves between 1890 and 1920 were more likely to have licensing laws enacted. The Licensing Racket covers the current landscape of occupational licensing in America and argues that not only do these regulations keep out a lot of people that should be allowed to work, but they also do a systematically bad job of ejecting bad actors from their fields.