Abstract
This study compared school construction costs before and after legislative changes to prevailing wage laws in West Virginia. The study uses data provided by the School Building Authority of West Virginia (SBA). The data suggests that school construction costs increased in the years prior to the legislative changes and decreased after. Comparing projects bid with and without prevailing wages since 2013 suggests construction costs per square foot decreased by 7.3 percent since the removal of the wage requirement. However, the magnitude of the decrease depends on the time-period examined and the individual schools included in the analysis. States that border West Virginia did not experience similar decreases in the costs of school construction during this time.
Document Type
Report
Publication Date
8-22-2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/cber.rr.2018.01
Repository Citation
Clark, Michael W. and Tester, Kenneth, "An Evaluation of How Repealing West Virginia’s Prevailing Wage Law Affected the Cost of Public Construction" (2018). CBER Research Report. 22.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cber_researchreports/22
