Occupational licensing can serve the public interest by screening for quality or the private interest by restricting entry and sustaining rents. Yet most licensing requirements reflect both rationales, making them difficult to separate empirically. This paper exploits a non-quality-related margin of licensing requirements to study the consequences of entry-restricting regulation. I examine a major wave of state medical licensing reforms from 1960 through the 1970s, when more than 30 states removed citizenship requirements for foreign medical graduate (FMG) licensure. Using a newly digitized individual-level dataset covering physicians in the U.S. and a staggered difference-in-differences design, I find that removing citizenship requirements increased annual first-time FMG licensing flows by at least 20 percent relative to their pre-reform baseline. The effect was concentrated after the federal government relaxed the home-country return requirement, indicating that state licensing and federal visa barriers acted as complementary constraints. This entry response translated only into a short-run increase in the stock of licensed FMGs, as declines among earlier-licensed FMGs offset new entry in the medium run. In high-Medicaid-exposure counties, FMG entry coincided with declines in U.S.-trained physicians, alongside increases in nonprofit hospital capacity and utilization. In low-Medicaid-exposure counties, both physician groups expanded, but hospital capacity did not increase. Together, the results show that removing a licensing barrier not directly tied to clinical quality reallocated physician supply rather than uniformly expanding it, with distributional heterogeneity shaped by local insurance markets.

Females' increased participation in the workforce in the past century was the most significant change in the US labor market (Goldin, 2006). An often cited, but understudied, reason for females' increased LFP was the elimination of the marriage bar, a policy prohibiting married women from working. We gathered new data from 1900–1940 to document the prevalence of the marriage bar in teaching across US cities. Using the 1880–1940 Census and a difference-in-differences design, we show that marriage bars decreased the share of married female teachers by 2.3 percentage points (15%). This decrease was offset by an increase in single female teachers. We also find suggestive evidence that marriage bars increased retention among single teachers and possibly delayed or deterred marriage, particularly for older women and those exposed to the policy longer. These findings highlight the role of discriminatory employment policies in affecting work forces and workers' family decisions.

Using data on the NBER working paper series, we show that the dissemination of economics research suffers from a congestion problem: An increase in the number of weekly released working papers on average reduces downloads, abstract views, and media attention for each paper. Subsequent publishing and citation outcomes are harmed as well. Papers written by prominent authors are not immune to this congestion effect. Finally, suggestive evidence on viewership and downloads implies that working papers substitute for the dissemination function of publication. Our results highlight how readers face time and cognitive constraints, with increased congestion in working papers leading to real impacts on how research is consumed.