Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/280543 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
AEI Economics Working Paper No. 2016-07
Publisher: 
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
There is an ongoing debate about the effect of changes in labor regulations such as Right-to-Work (RTW) laws on rising income inequality in the U.S. In this paper, we use a relatively new methodology, the Synthetic Control Method – which we argue is more suitable for analyzing this data – to examine the impact of a state's adoption of an RTW law on income inequality. We use a wide range of inequality measures for states that enacted their RTW laws between the 1960s and the 2000s. Unlike some earlier papers that suggest a negative link between the RTW laws and correlates of inequality such as wages, we find that RTW laws had no significant impact on income inequality in these states.
Subjects: 
Income inequality
collective bargaining
JEL: 
A
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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