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PurposeThe 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.Design/methodology/approachThis 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.FindingsIn 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.Originality/valueThis 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.

This paper investigates the impact of state-level Certificate-of-Need (CON) laws on COVID and non-COVID deaths in the United States during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. CON laws limit the expansion and acquisition of new medical services, such as new hospital beds. The coronavirus pandemic created a surge in demand for medical services, which might be exacerbated in some states that have CON laws. Our investigation focuses on mortality due to COVID and non-COVID reasons and understanding how these laws affect access to healthcare for illnesses that might require similar medical equipment to COVID patients. We find that states with high healthcare use due to COVID that reformed their CON laws during the pandemic had a reduction in mortality resulting from COVID-19, septicemia, diabetes, chronic lower respiratory disease, influenza or pneumonia, and Alzheimer’s Disease, relative to non-reforming CON states.

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