It is common practice for academic and other researchers and writers to offer broad statistics on economic and other performance measures between right-to-work states and non-right-to-work states. Doing so helps scholars identify trends that may be worth greater research and contemplation.
If common measurements yield consistent differences in economic growth or employment in right-to-work states versus non-right to work states, it suggests that right-to-work laws maybe be part of an explanation for those different outcomes. These types of narrative statistics can provide great perspective. They can signal where more detailed analyses may be warranted. This signal is evident in several important economic indicators when comparing right-to-work and non-right-to-work states. For instance:
Population changes — including interstate migration — may make for the most interesting and insightful measure to gage the impact of right-to-work laws. It may be the best proxy for considering the different elements that might contribute to someone’s decision to try to improve their overall quality-of-life. Most people cannot move from one state to another easily, as there are significant financial and psychological costs to moving.
The academic literature on the determinants of interstate migration is a rich one, marked by approaches that attempt to isolate specific reasons people move. These include such things as amenities, such as parks, access to bodies of water, etc., violent crime rates, sales taxes on food, welfare spending, weather[*] and even whether or not a state possesses a right-to-work law.
Professor Richard Vedder’s 2010 Cato Journal article titled, “Right-to-Work Laws: Liberty, Prosperity, and Quality of Life,” finds a positive relationship between RTW laws and interstate migration. He noted, using descriptive statistics, that the population in right-to-work states from 1970 to 2008 increased by more than 100% while in non-right-to-work states it had only increased by 25.7%. Only about 15% of that change could be explained by new states joining the group of right-to-work states, according to Vedder.[7]
In order to isolate the possible impact of right-to-work on interstate migration, Vedder performed statistical analyses with several different models and controls. He reports that, “Without exception, in all the estimations, a statistically significant positive relationship … was observed between the presence of right-to-work laws and net migration.” This research was conducted while incorporating important variables such as “tax, climate, occupational composition of the labor force, unemployment population density, and economic growth variables.”[†]
These findings are important to consider, especially with respect to Michigan, which was the only state to lose population from 2000 to 2010.[8]
[*] For a terrific paper on interstate migration and weather, see “Moving to Nice Weather” by Jordan Rappaport. According to Rappaport, Michigan’s weather worked to decrease population growth by -1.5% to 0.0%, depending on the county, from 1970 to 2000. Jordan Rappaport, “Moving to Nice Weather,” Regional Science and Urban Economics (2007): 390, Figure 2. Controlling for weather’s influence in measures of right-to-work impacts has been important because most of the original right-to-work states were located in the southern U.S.
[†] Richard Vedder, “Right-to-Work Laws: Liberty, Prosperity, and Quality of Life” (Washington DC: Cato Institute, 2010), 174, https://perma.cc/RCT2-X795; The Mackinac Center for Public Policy’s 2013 study, “Economic Growth and Right-to-Work Laws,” found that adoption of a right-to-work law boosted average annual population growth in right-to-work states by 1.3 percentage points from 1971-1990, 0.56 percentage points from 1991-2011 and 0.54 percentage points from 1947-2011. The studies regression results did show a decrease in average annual population growth of 0.35 percentage points from 1947 to 1970, but it was not a statistically significant finding.