John Fallon

Welcome! I’m a fifth-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 will be on the market next year.

Research

Competitive Occupational Licensure: Doctors and Chiropractors

Occupational licensing is a major U.S. labor market institution, but we lack a clear model of how licensing boards interact, compete, and set policy. While policy debates often focus on the scope of practice allowed under licenses, we have little understanding of how two licensed professions compete when their scopes overlap, as they frequently do. I develop a simple model in which similar professions compete for labor supply and prestige, and apply it to early 20th-century licensing conflicts between chiropractors and allopaths. Licensing boards help solve a “market-for-lemons” problem but can also act as cartels. Allowing overlapping occupations to have independent boards can mitigate both issues.

Using complete-count census data, I show that the introduction of a chiropractic licensing board increased the prevalence, earnings, education, and home values of chiropractors, consistent with higher practitioner quality. These gains are reversed in states that adopt “basic science boards,” which restrict the standards chiropractic boards can set. Digitized records from the Journal of the American Medical Association show that medical boards raised their standards in response to chiropractic competition, explaining the decline in allopath prevalence. I formalize this dynamic with a duopoly model and show that its equilibria align with observed census outcomes.

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)

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