This paper investigates the effects of state right-to-work (RTW) laws on individuals’ well-being and economic sentiment. Using licensed microdata from Gallup between 2008 and 2017, this paper finds that the adoption of RTW laws is associated with a .029 SD and a .041 SD increase in individuals’ life satisfaction and economic sentiment, respectively. A difference-in-differences estimator suggests that these improvements are concentrated among union workers. These results are robust to entropy balancing and border-pair approaches. Moreover, these improvements in well-being are consistent with an increase in competition among unions, which prompts them to provide higher-quality services that are valued by their members.

中文翻译：

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工作权法律有效吗？个人幸福感和经济情感的证据

本文研究了国家工作权（RTW）法律对个人福祉和经济情感的影响。本文使用盖洛普（Gallup）在2008年至2017年之间获得许可的微数据，发现采用RTW法律分别使个人的生活满意度和经济情感提高了0.029 SD和.041 SD。差异估算器表明，这些改进主要集中在工会工人中。这些结果对于熵平衡和边界对方法是可靠的。此外，幸福感的这些提高与工会之间竞争的加剧相一致，这促使工会提供会员所重视的更高质量的服务。