Occupational Licensing in the EU: Protecting Consumers or Limiting Competition?

Occupational licensing regulations require workers in many different professions to obtain a special permit to work legally in their chosen field. Although professional associations argue that the only goal of professional licensing is to protect the public, occupational regulation may also reduce competition: for example, by reducing entry. This paper reviews the recent literature and policy developments on the subject, with a focus on the European Union.

     

What is the objective of professional licensing? Evidence from the US market for lawyers

According to public interest theory, professional licensing solves the lemon problem generated by asymmetric information. In contrast, the capture theory claims that licensing aims at increasing professional salaries by restricting supply. This paper shows that the two theories can be identified using data from one regulated profession and provides an empirical application to the US market for entry level lawyers. The empirical results support capture theory.     

Licensing Exam Difficulty and Entry Salaries in the US Market for Lawyers

This article provides evidence of a correlation between licensing exam difficulty and salaries in a regulated profession. Exam difficulty is positively correlated with salaries across states and over time, both at the aggregate and individual state levels. The magnitude of this correlation is substantial: a 1 per cent increase in exam difficulty implies a 1.7 per cent increase in median entry‐level salaries. Exam difficulty does not significantly affect the inter‐quartile difference in salaries.     

Occupational Regulation in the European Union: Coverage and Wage Effects

We present the first EU‐wide study on the prevalence and labour market impact of occupational regulation in the European Union. Drawing on a new EU Survey of Regulated Occupations, we find that licensing affects about 22 per cent of workers in the European Union, although there is significant variability across member states and occupations. On average, licensing is associated with a 4 per cent higher hourly wage. Using decomposition techniques we show that rent capture accounts for one‐third of this effect and the remainder is attributed to signalling. We find considerable heterogeneity in the wage gains by occupation and level of educational attainment. Finally, occupational licensing increases wage inequality. After accounting for composition effects, licensing increases the standard deviation of wages by about 0.02 log points.     

Responsive pricing

We study the efficiency property of responsive pricing, a scheme that proposes to increase prices as a function of the level of capacity utilization in environments where traditional allocation schemes (e.g. competitive markets, non-linear pricing) cannot be implemented in practice. We show that although responsive pricing implements allocations that are arbitrarily close to full capacity utilization (no wasted capacity and no excess demand), these allocations are not always efficient. We identify conditions under which efficiency occurs and discuss implications for the use of responsive pricing. We would like to thank seminar participants at the LSE, Venezia, Toulouse, and Copenhagen as well as Piero Gottardi, Karel Mertens, Marco Ottaviani, Markus Poschke, Karl Schlag, and Sanne Zwart for useful comments.