John Fallon

Competitive Occupational Licensure: Doctors Versus Chiropractors

This paper provides the first analysis of competitive occupational licensure, where substitute professions maintain separate licensing boards that set entry requirements strategically. I develop and structurally estimate a model where professional organizations choose licensing stringency to maximize industry profits while accounting for competitive responses, as workers with heterogeneous abilities select occupations based on expected returns and consumers observe only average quality within each profession. Testing this theory using historical competition between medical doctors (MDs) and chiropractors (DCs) from 1907–1960, I exploit digitized American Medical Association records and state-by-year variation in chiropractic board adoption. Medical boards responded strategically by increasing college requirements by 10 percentage points, mandating internships (10+ percentage points), and reducing pass rates by 5 percentage points. These regulatory changes generated substantial economic effects: doctors' home values rose by 26% while their numbers declined by 17–40 practitioners per 100,000 population, and chiropractors saw 44% higher home values with increased market presence of 2–12 practitioners per 100,000. Structural estimation reveals that observed equilibria closely approximate profit-maximizing sequential competition rather than welfare-maximizing behavior.

Fewer Licenses, Similar Teachers: Changing Licensing Tests in Indiana

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 difficult licensure test. The number of unique individuals issued an initial Indiana teaching license fell by about 22% under the new standard. Despite this substantial drop, 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 school setting, with city schools experiencing a measurable decline in teacher quality. We document a clear shift toward emergency-permit teachers following the introduction of the more difficult test. This shift may have moderated the average-quality response and concentrated effects in markets with binding teacher-supply constraints.

Extracting Value from Coworkers: Who Should Work with Whom and When?

Workers learn from their peers, but which collaborations build lasting skills? I study co-teaching, where general and special education teachers share a classroom, using administrative records on Indiana teachers, 2012–2019. I compare the same teacher before and after co-teaching. Those paired with an experienced partner (16+ years) score 0.10σ higher after returning to solo instruction; estimates for inexperienced partners are near zero. Longer collaborations add nothing. Teachers with two years of experience gain most. Schools do not exploit this: conditional on staffing, partner assignment is indistinguishable from random. Reallocating partnerships toward experienced mentors implies fiscal benefit-cost ratios of 3.6:1–7.0:1.

The Diminishing Returns to Human Recruiting in Online Labor Markets

with Emma Wiles and John Horton

Employers often rely on outside recruiters to find workers, but it is unclear whether human intermediaries add value when employers already have access to algorithmic screening tools. We study a randomized experiment in a large online labor market that assigned human recruiting assistance to employers. The recruiters increased the search and screening intensity of treated job posts: treated job posts had more recruiting and more applicant screening done on their behalf, resulting in 5% more applicants. Employers of treated job posts redirected their own screening efforts toward recruiter-sourced candidates and away from applicants who found the post on their own. Despite the increase in search intensity, treated employers were no more likely to hire than employers of control posts with access only to algorithmic tools. Match quality appears, at best, no better for the hires that resulted from the treated job posts, and treated employers were less likely to return to the platform to post a second vacancy after the experiment. We develop a model of delegated recruiting in which recruiters and employers rely on a common noisy signal; it predicts that recruiting adds value when the recruiter brings information the algorithm lacks and can subtract value when the two parties' assessments are correlated. Consistent with the model's screening mechanism, recruited applicants are positively selected on observable characteristics yet do not improve hiring outcomes. These findings suggest that as algorithmic screening improves, the scope for intermediaries to add value shrinks because it becomes harder to access independent information.

Federal Workforce Reductions

with Lindsey Kaler, Cameron Arnzen, Niamh Stull, and Susan Moffitt

A monthly panel of federal employment built from OPM records, comparing agencies that carried out 2025 reductions in force with those that did not, against a hand-coded measure of what Project 2025 proposed for each agency.

What Do Graduate Student Unions Do?

with Jesse Meredith

How stipends, doctoral production by field, and graduate access change after graduate assistants ratify a first collective bargaining agreement.

Firefighter Professionalization and State Capacity

with Susan Moffitt

A panel of U.S. fire departments, 1985–2017, assembled to study how the fire service professionalized.