The Effect of Project Labor Agreements on the Cost of School Construction

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of project labor agreements on school construction cost in New England. In contrast to prior research, which applied very leanly specified cost models to secondary data, this study explores more sophisticated models using a rich data set on school characteristics collected by the authors to control for the increased complexity inherent in PLA-built schools. The results indicate that while simple models exhibit large positive PLA effects, such effects are lacking in more complete models. We suggest that the PLA coefficients in simple models are capturing the increased complexity, and cost, of school projects built under PLAs.