Occupational entry regulations and their effects on productivity in services: Firm-level evidence

Indre Bambalaite, Giuseppe Nicoletti and Christina von Rueden

No 1605, OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This paper assesses the possible dynamic effects of occupational entry regulations (OER) on productivity. It combines firm-level productivity data with a new cross-country policy indicator measuring the stringency of OER by the presence of administrative burdens, qualifications requirements, and mobility restrictions, for five professional and ten personal services. The evidence suggests that bold reforms easing OER, especially those concerning qualification requirements, could help increase the contribution of personal and professional services to aggregate productivity growth via two channels: the acceleration of their catch up to best global practices (within-firm channel), where firms in regulated sectors could gain up to 2.5 percentage points of productivity on average; and a higher contribution of labour reallocation to firms’ employment growth (between-firm channel), which could increase by up to 10 percent for the most productive firms.

Keywords: catch-up; occupational licensing; productivity; reallocation; regulations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J44 L16 L5 O43 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-lma, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/c8b88d8b-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1605-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().