Do Right to Work Laws Worsen Income Inequality? Evidence from the Last Five Decades

There is an ongoing debate about whether changes in labor regulations such as the Right to Work (RTW) laws are contributing to the rising trend of income inequality in the U.S. We adopt the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) for comparative case study to examine the impact of a state's adoption of an RTW law on its income inequality. We use a wide range of inequality measures for Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, states that enacted their RTW laws between the 1960s and the 2000s. We find that the RTW laws did not impact income inequality in these states. This result is underpinned by additional findings of lack of impacts of these laws on unionization, wages and salaries, and investment