TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Anderson, D. Mark
AU  - Brown, Ryan
AU  - Charles, Kerwin Kofi
AU  - Rees, Daniel I.
        TI  - The Effect of Occupational Licensing on Consumer Welfare: Early Midwifery Laws and Maternal Mortality
        PY  - 2016/Jul/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 10074
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp10074
        AB  - Occupational licensing is intended to protect consumers. Whether it does so is an important, but unanswered, question. Exploiting variation across states and municipalities in the timing and details of midwifery laws introduced during the period 1900-1940, and using a rich data set that we assembled from primary sources, we find that requiring midwives to be licensed reduced maternal mortality by 6 to 7 percent. In addition, we find that requiring midwives to be licensed may have had led to modest reductions in nonwhite infant mortality and mortality among children under the age of 2 from diarrhea. These estimates provide the first econometric evidence of which we are aware on the relationship between licensure and consumer safety, and are directly relevant to ongoing policy debates both in the United States and in the developing world surrounding the merits of licensing midwives.
        KW  - maternal mortality
KW  - midwives
KW  - occupational licensing
KW  - infant mortality
        ER  -