Bradley Larsen

Brad Larsen analyzes state-level occupational licensing laws—requirements that a worker must satisfy to work in certain occupations (e.g., general contractor, teacher, barber). As part of that research, he explores how these laws interact with race. For example, his work finds that licensing laws for U.S. public school teachers, which came into play between 1990-2007, increased the proportion of teachers coming from selective colleges without decreasing racial diversity among teachers and without differentially affecting high-minority school districts. In ongoing work, he is developing data-driven tools to identify policies that are most consistent (and those that are most inconsistent) with their stated goals of protecting consumers.