IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlawec/doi10.1086-707081.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do Right-to-Work Laws Work? Evidence on Individuals’ Well-Being and Economic Sentiment

Author

Listed:
  • Christos Andreas Makridis

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of state right-to-work (RTW) laws on individuals’ well-being and economic sentiment. Using licensed microdata from Gallup between 2008 and 2017, this paper finds that the adoption of RTW laws is associated with a .029 SD and a .041 SD increase in individuals’ life satisfaction and economic sentiment, respectively. A difference-in-differences estimator suggests that these improvements are concentrated among union workers. These results are robust to entropy balancing and border-pair approaches. Moreover, these improvements in well-being are consistent with an increase in competition among unions, which prompts them to provide higher-quality services that are valued by their members.

Suggested Citation

  • Christos Andreas Makridis, 2019. "Do Right-to-Work Laws Work? Evidence on Individuals’ Well-Being and Economic Sentiment," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 62(4), pages 713-745.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/707081
    DOI: 10.1086/707081
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/707081
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/707081
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/707081?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kyung-nok Chun, 2023. "What do Right-to-Work Laws do to Unions? Evidence from Six Recently-Enacted RTW Laws," Journal of Labor Research, Springer, vol. 44(1), pages 94-144, June.
    2. Gihleb, Rania & Giuntella, Osea & Tan, Jian Qi, 2023. "The Impact of Right-to-Work Laws on Long Hours and Work Schedules," IZA Discussion Papers 16588, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Nguyen, Justin Hung & Qiu, Buhui, 2022. "Right-to-Work laws and corporate innovation," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    4. Deb, P.; & Norton, E.C.; & Wooldridge, J.M.; & Zabel, J.E.;, 2024. "A Flexible, Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Difference-in-Differences Estimator for Repeated Cross-Sections," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 24/17, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jlawec:doi:10.1086/707081. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLE .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.