While considerable efforts have been made by legislators, business associations, and political organizations to pass right-to-work (RTW) laws in states across the country, the empirical evidence on the effect of adopting an RTW law on labor market outcomes and state budgets is both varied and mixed. This article provides a forecast on the effect of RTW laws on important labor market outcomes-including earnings, employment, unionization, and inequality. It also investigates RTW's impacts on two particularly affected industries (manufacturing and construction) and three demographic groups (African-American, Latino/a, and female workers). The findings are subsequently applied to the state of Illinois to project the potential law's impact on Illinois workers and on the state's tax revenues. By and large, as a policy prescription, RTW would generate harmful effects to Illinois' economy, lower its capacity to provide essential public services and degrade the quality and condition of the state's labor force.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, many policy analysts are rethinking national housing policies, including affordable housing programs. We review the literature to compare the largest tenant-based (housing choice voucher or HCV) and place-based (low-income-housing tax credit or LIHTC) programs with respect to cost effi ciency and access to better quality neighborhoods. We also provide an overview of low-income-rental-housing policy trends and perform a rough comparison of neighborhood quality across programs and counties, focusing on four main urban counties in the Fourth Federal Reserve District (Cuyahoga, Hamilton, and Franklin in Ohio, and Allegheny in Pennsylvania). We fi nd that in spite of relatively stable real rents, affordability in the Ohio counties declined between 2005 and 2009 due to a drop in real incomes. We fi nd that in Allegheny County during 2006-2009, neighborhood quality was comparable for rental units available through each of the two housing programs. We also fi nd evidence that neighborhoods with LIHTC investments placed in service by 2000 in Allegheny County improved their quality by 2006-2009 relative to comparable neighborhoods, but we do not fi nd similar evidence for the Ohio counties. Lacking tenantlevel data on LIHTC renters, it is hard to explain these regional differences. Finally, we note that richer data reporting on various aspects of HCV and LIHTC would improve the ability of program administrators and policymakers to design, coordinate, and evaluate programs based on effi ciency and effectiveness.

“Federal-aid swap” programs allow states and local governments to bypass federal Davis-Bacon prevailing wages and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) goals by exchanging federal funds that have been allocated to highway projects with state funds. The Iowa Department of Transportation approved a federal-aid swap program in February 2018. Using data on more than 1,200 highway construction projects in Iowa from 2016 to 2020, I find that the cost of projects in the federal-aid swap program are not statistically different from those that were not swapped, after accounting for project size and complexity, project type, and project location. Regression results indicate that Davis-Bacon prevailing wages and DBE goals have no effect on total construction costs. However, the federal-aid swap program is statistically associated with a decrease in the likelihoods that a project is covered by the Davis-Bacon Act by 10 percentage points and DBE goals by 4 percentage points. Because the payment of Davis-Bacon prevailing wages is statistically associated with an 8 percentage-point decrease in the chances that a highway project is awarded to an out-of-state contractor, the federal-aid swap program may have increased the market share of out-of-state contractors at the expense of Iowa-based contractors.

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Data for over 2,000 highway pavement projects, constructed between 2014 and 2020, are used to examine the effect of Kentucky’s prevailing wage repeal in 2017 on relative bid costs and bid competition for state and federally funded work. Other than Davis-Bacon and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise policies for federal projects, and prevailing wage requirements on state-funded work prior to 2017, all highway construction in Kentucky is built to the same standard. A difference-in-differences and fixed effects analysis fails to find statistically significant differences in bid costs and competition between federal and state projects before and after repeal. Competition on pavement projects in Kentucky is very low compared to other states. Consequently, the impact of increased competition on bid costs is very high. Policies increasing competition in Kentucky would be more effective in reducing costs than prevailing wage repeal.