The economic impact of right-to-work laws: Evidence from collective bargaining agreements and corporate policies

Competitive pressure and firm investment efficiency: Evidence from corporate employment decisions

“…We retrieve data on historical business headquarters from the Software Repository for Accounting and Finance (SRAF) website of Bill McDonald. , We next identify the year in which each state enacted an RTW law based on Chava et al (2020). We define RTW as an indicator variable that equals 1 for all years after each firm's historical home state has passed an RTW law and zero otherwise.…”

Evolution of Union Wages and Determinants

“…However, empirical work on the RTW law and union wage relationship is varied, with the legislation appearing to have minimal impacts on wages (Devinatz 2011;Moore 1998). Reed (2003) proclaims that RTW laws positively affect wages, while Chava et al (2020) state that the laws have negative impacts on union wages. Bruno et al's (2015) review concludes that RTW laws have an average effect of 0 to -5% on wages.…”

Policy Brief: Right-to-Work Legislation 1947—Present in the United States

“…CBAs can vary in length and are typically multi-year contracts, so some union shops may stick around after RTW is passed because the law applies only to new negotiations. Recent research on a sample of CBAs from 1988 to 2016 found that the typical contract length is three years (Chava et al 2020). Thus, the opportunity to leave an individual's union organization and stop paying union dues may not come until sometime after RTW passage.…”

“…The bargaining power hypothesis maintains that passing RTW legislation directly reduces a union organization's bargaining power, lowering the union sector's ability to negotiate wages and benefits, therefore lowering union wages and also lowering the benefits of becoming a union member compared to a state without RTW (Chava et al 2020). The bargaining power hypothesis predicts a similar outcome to the free-rider problem in which the passage of RTW would reduce unionization rates and union benefits in a state (Moore and Newman 1985).…”