Cooked Study on Freedom of Contract (a.k.a. “right to work”) in West Virginia

The Washington Post had an article on a vote in West Virginia to make it a “right-to-work” state. This means that workers cannot sign enforceable contracts with employers, which require that workers covered by the contract pay the union their share of its operating costs.

The piece refers to a study that purported to find that states with “right-to-work” (RTW) laws had more job growth than other states. This study was fundamentally flawed in its design, since it was treated as a time series s...