John Fallon

Welcome! I’m a sixth-year PhD student in the economics department at Boston University. My research focuses on labor economics and education policy. I am particularly interested in occupational licensing and teacher labor markets. I enjoy working on projects that can directly inform policy.

Before BU, I earned my master’s degree at Northeastern and my bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago. My committee members are Kevin Lang, Marcus Winters, James Feigenbaum, and Josh Goodman.

I am on the market.

Research

Competitive Occupational Licensure: Doctors Versus Chiropractors

In many regulated industries, near-substitute professions such as doctors and chiropractors or architects and engineers each operate under separate licensing boards. Despite the increasing reach of occupational licensing, which now covers about 25 percent of the workforce and continues to grow, most research assumes there is only one board per industry. This paper asks whether having multiple, competing licensing boards for overlapping professions benefits or harms social welfare. I develop a structural model in which workers and consumers make choices in markets affected by information frictions, and professional boards strategically set licensing standards. To test the model’s predictions, I use newly digitized data on the historical rise of medical and chiropractic boards in the early twentieth-century United States, exploiting comprehensive records and a stacked difference-in-differences design. The results show that when states introduced chiropractic boards, medical boards responded by increasing licensing requirements. The number of doctors fell, but their earnings and educational attainment rose, while the number and status of chiropractors also increased. Simulations based on these findings suggest that competing licensing boards can address information problems and increase overall welfare by giving consumers more choices. These insights are relevant to a broad and expanding set of licensed professions.

Fewer Licenses, Similar Teachers: Changing Licensing Tests in Indiana PDF (with Marcus A. Winters, PhD)

We use longitudinal administrative data from Indiana to examine changes in teacher quality following the state’s shift to a more stringent licensure test. Despite a significant drop in new licenses issued following the change in the licensure test standard, the overall quality of incoming teachers and the relative quality of licensed teachers compared to unlicensed teachers remained largely unchanged. We find some heterogeneity by subject and school setting, with urban schools experiencing a modest decline in teacher quality, particularly in math. Our findings raise questions about the value of requiring prospective teachers to pass licensure tests to obtain a license.

Learning by Doing (Together): Collaboration and Teacher Skill Formation PDF

How do workplace collaborations affect individual worker productivity once the partnership ends? I study co-teaching in schools to measure whether teachers genuinely learn from collaboration or simply benefit from immediate assistance. Using administrative data on all teachers in a state from 2012-2019, I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in co-teaching assignment driven by special education enrollment and scheduling constraints rather than teacher quality. Teachers experience persistent improvement in student achievement after returning to solo teaching, with gains averaging 0.04 SD and reaching 0.10 SD when paired with highly experienced partners (16+ years). These lasting productivity gains demonstrate that strategic workplace collaboration can accelerate skill development, with important implications for team formation and mentorship design across industries.

Teaching

Course Instructor

Debates in Labor Economics - Harvard University (Fall 2024, Fall 2025)

Teaching Fellow

Elementary Mathematical Economics - Boston University (Spring 2025)

Economics of Information - Boston University (Spring 2025)

Economic Development of Latin America - Boston University (Spring 2025)

Intermediate Macroeconomic Analysis - Boston University (Fall 2021)

History of the Global Economy - Northeastern University (Fall 2018)

Contact

Email fallonj@bu.edu Bluesky @john-fallon-econ.com