Physicians' Occupational Licensing and the Quantity-Quality Trade-Off

Juan Atal (), Tomas Larroucau (), Pablo Munoz () and Cristobal Otero ()
Additional contact information
Juan Atal: University of Pennsylvania and NBER
Tomas Larroucau: Arizona State University
Pablo Munoz: Universidad de Chile
Cristobal Otero: Columbia Business School

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: Occupational licensing is a widespread quality regulation that increases the quality of labor but reduces its quantity. We provide a framework to empirically quantify this trade-off and apply it to physician licensing, where both quality and access to care are critical concerns. Using quasi-exogenous variation driven mostly by a recent and unprecedented migration of physicians to Chile, we show that more physicians improve access and patient outcomes in tertiary care, including mortality. We also find that lower quality - as measured by physician performance on the licensing exam - worsens patient outcomes. Building on these findings, we evaluate the implications of locally changing the stringency of the current licensing policy.

JEL-codes: I18 J24 J44 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 79 pages
Date: 2025-07-28
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/system/files/worki ... per%20Submission.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:pen:papers:25-016

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Administrator ().