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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 holds that licensure creates wage premiums by establishing economic monopolies. This article demonstrates that, contrary to established wisdom, licensure does not limit competition, nor does it increase wages. Results are based on a new occupational dataset, covering 30 years, that exploits interstate variability in licensure across the 300 census-identified occupations. I argue that licensure, instead of increasing wages, creates a set of institutional mechanisms that enhance entry into the occupation, particularly for historically disadvantaged groups, while simultaneously stagnating quality.

Fine-grained epidemiological modeling of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 -- capturing who is infected at which locations -- can aid the development of policy responses that account for heterogeneous risks of different locations as well as the disparities in infections among different demographic groups. Here, we develop a metapopulation SEIR disease model that uses dynamic mobility networks, derived from US cell phone data, to capture the hourly movements of millions of people from local neighborhoods (census block groups, or CBGs) to points of interest (POIs) such as restaurants, grocery stores, or religious establishments. We simulate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 from March 1-May 2, 2020 among a population of 105 million people in 10 of the largest US metropolitan statistical areas. We show that by integrating these mobility networks, which connect 60k CBGs to 565k POIs with a total of 5.4 billion hourly edges, even a relatively simple epidemiological model can accurately capture the case trajectory despite dramatic changes in population behavior due to the virus. Furthermore, by modeling detailed information about each POI, like visitor density and visit length, we can estimate the impacts of fine-grained reopening plans: we predict that a small minority of "superspreader" POIs account for a large majority of infections, that reopening some POI categories (like full-service restaurants) poses especially large risks, and that strategies restricting maximum occupancy at each POI are more effective than uniformly reducing mobility. Our models also predict higher infection rates among disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic groups solely from differences in mobility: disadvantaged groups have not been able to reduce mobility as sharply, and the POIs they visit (even within the same category) tend to be smaller, more crowded, and therefore more dangerous. By modeling who is infected at which locations, our model supports fine-grained analyses that can inform more effective and equitable policy responses to SARS-CoV-2.

We review the main distributional effects of the Great Recession and the ways in which those effects have been organized into narratives. The Great Recession may affect poverty, inequality, and other economic and noneconomic outcomes by changing individual-level behavior, encouraging the rise of new social movements or reviving older ones, motivating new economic policy and associated institutional change, or affecting the ideologies and frames through which labor markets and the key forces for economic change are viewed. The amount of sociological research within each of these areas is relatively small (compared with the amount contributed by other disciplines) and has focused disproportionately on monitoring trends or uncovering the causal effects of the Great Recession on individual-level behavior. We review this existing research and point to opportunities for sociologists to better understand how the Great Recession may be changing the economy as well as our narratives about its problems and dysfunctions.

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