David E. Harrington

The Impact of State Licensing Regulations on Low-Skilled Immigrants: The Case of Vietnamese Manicurists

The number of people living in the United States who cannot speak English, or cannot speak it well, more than doubled from 1980 to 2000. This is a visible—actually, audible—effect of the recent surge in immigration, which increased the fraction of foreign born from 6 percent in 1980 to 11 percent in 2000. Less noticeable is that recent immigrants are less skilled than earlier waves of immigrants, with fewer high-school graduates relative to natives of the same age. Low-skilled immigrants are often drawn to jobs in the service sector and sometimes choose to migrate to areas with shortages of low-skilled labor. The dispersion of immigrants across occupations and geography may be impeded, however, by state licensing regulations, which specify the minimum qualifications for a range of low-skilled occupations, such as manicurists, beauticians, nurse’s aides, and taxicab drivers. We estimate the effects of state regulations on the entry of Vietnamese into manicuring and their dispersion across the country. Vietnamese entered manicuring in large numbers in the 1990s beginning in areas with large enclaves, such as California, and spreading throughout much of the country. By 2000, 41 percent of manicurists were Vietnamese and 5 percent of all Vietnamese workers were manicurists, compared to only 0.04 percent of non-Vietnamese workers. Vietnamese immigrants share many of the characteristics that set immigrants apart from natives: 30 percent report speaking English poorly or not at all and 38 percent of adult Vietnamese immigrants have not graduated from high school. Also, almost all adult Vietnamese (94 percent) are immigrants. While all states require manicurists to be licensed, the requirements vary widely, especially from the vantage point of low-skilled Vietnamese immigrants. Thirty-five states do not require manicurists to know much (if any) English: Florida has no exam; California, Texas, and Washington offer exams in Vietnamese; 15 states allow the use of interpreters or dictionaries; and in 16 states applicants can bypass the English-only exam by transferring their licenses from another state. In contrast, 16 states require some level of English proficiency, either indirectly by requiring manicurists transferring a license to pass a separate exam on state laws, or directly by requiring applicants to pass an English test or restricting reciprocity to only those who took licensing exams given in English. The required amount of training also varies considerably, ranging from 100 to 600 hours at state-approved cosmetology schools. Finally, many states require manicurists to be either high-school graduates or to have completed a minimum of seven to ten years of schooling. Previous studies have estimated the impact of licensing laws on high-skilled immigrants (Adriana D. Kugler and Robert M. Sauer, 2005), minorities (Stuart Dorsey, 1980), barbers (Robert J. Thornton and Andrew R. Weintraub, 1979), and workers with different amounts of education (M. Morris Kleiner, 2000). Also, Madeline Zavodny (2000) examines whether declaring English to be the official state language affects the earnings of limited-English proficient workers. This is the first study, * Federman: Department of Economics, Pitzer College, 1050 North Mills Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711 (e-mail: Maya_Federman@pitzer.edu); Harrington: Department of Economics, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH 43022 (e-mail: Harrington@kenyon.edu); Krynski: Department of Economics, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH 43022 (e-mail: Krynski@kenyon.edu). We thank Todd D. Kendall, Gerald Oettinger, Robert F. Tamura, and seminar participants at Claremont McKenna College, Clemson University, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research for helpful comments. We appreciate the financial support provided by Pitzer College and the J. and Paul G. Himmelright Chair in Economics at Kenyon College. 1 Directly: District of Columbia, Illinois, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. Indirectly: Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Vermont.

THE EFFECT OF STATE FUNERAL REGULATIONS ON CREMATION RATES: TESTING FOR DEMAND INDUCEMENT IN FUNERAL MARKETS

This article presents evidence that state funeral regulations affect the choice of whether to cremate or bury dead bodies. States that require either funeral directors to be embalmers or funeral homes to have embalming preparation rooms have lower cremation rates, holding other factors such as income, age, educational attainment, nativity, religious adherence, race, and region constant. These embalming regulations reduce cremation rates by roughly 16 percent, which increases the amount spent on funerals by 2.6 percent. The article also presents evidence that funeral directors induce consumers to choose burial over cremation, which supports one of the fundamental premises underlying the Federal Trade Commissions Funeral Rule. However, the additional evidence that inducement is more prevalent in states with stringent funeral regulations suggests that repealing state regulations that impede competition might be more effective than the Funeral Rule in attacking the problem of demand inducement.

The Gender Gap in Funeral Directors: Burying Women with Ready-to-Embalm Laws?

Over the last few decades, the gender composition of funeral directors in the United States has changed dramatically as women have entered this traditionally male-dominated occupation. To practise as funeral directors, women (and men) must be licensed in all but one state. The most extensive training requirements exist in the 27 states with ‘ready-to-embalm’ laws, which require funeral directors to be embalmers. Using a sample of 45,989 licensing records from 40 states, we find that 18.1 per cent of funeral directors were women in 2006. However, the proportion is significantly lower in states with ready-to-embalm laws. Our regressions imply that these laws reduce the proportion of female funeral directors by 24 per cent. More generally, we find that the number of funeral directors per capita is 17 per cent lower, on average, in states with ready-to-embalm laws.

Uncapping Ticket Markets

The popularity of StubHub, an event ticket secondary market, has led several state legislatures to repeal price ceilings on the resale of event tickets. Some have criticized this repeal, arguing that prices on the secondary market will rise dramatically as a result, to the detriment of consumers. This article empirically examines that concern, using StubHub data on resale prices of National Hockey League tickets before and after repeal. This article finds repeal had no persistent effect on the resale price of lower bowl seats to NHL games and no more than a small effect on the resale price of upper bowl seats. Just as important, the supply of tickets on the StubHub secondary market increased significantly after repeal, to the benefit of consumers.

Does It Pay to Wait? The Paths of Posted Prices and Ticket Composition for the Final Four and Super Bowl

A couple of weeks before the 2012 Super Bowl, Andrew Lehren of The New York Times advised fans wanting tickets to be “patient,” because prices in secondary ticket markets tend to fall “precipitously” as the time to kickoff nears. Using data compiled from SeatGeek.com on more than 46,000 ticket postings in the two weeks prior to the 2013 Super Bowl and more than 18,000 ticket postings prior to the 2012 NCAA Final Four, we find that average prices decreased in the last few days prior to these events, reaching their lowest levels on the mornings before kickoff and first tipoff. This evidence seems to support Lehrens recommendation that savvy fans should wait until the last minute to buy their tickets. But, we also show that savvy fans can often find similar or better bargains much earlier in the week by searching the available inventory. The greater variation in posted prices earlier in the week implies that fans can often find better bargains by searching than by being patient, especially for super-premium seats. We discuss how changes in technology have made it easier to search for bargains, while also insuring against being left ticketless if fans decide to patiently wait until the day of the game. Both strategies—patiently waiting until close to game time versus searching early and often—can produce bargains, although we suspect that changes in technology have increased the relative rewards to searching.

Death of the Autopsy: Is Better Imaging Technology or Cost Cutting to Blame?

The U.S. autopsy rate has fallen precipitously over the last half century, from 50 percent of bodies to less than eight percent today. Using data for 46 states from 1987 to 2000, we analyze the degree to which the decrease in the autopsy rate is due to better imaging technology or to cost pressures. We find that cost cutting pressures are more responsible for the decline than technology improvements. Specifically, increases in HMO market share explain 21 percent of the decrease in the autopsy rate over our sample period; reductions in the number of hospital deaths explain 30 percent; and increases in the availability of MRIs explain 19 percent.