Jiang Sichao, Miller Keaton
Department of Economics, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97403, OR, USA.
J Cannabis Res. 2022 Jul 26;4(1):42. doi: 10.1186/s42238-022-00149-6.
Over the past several years, cannabis has become legal for recreational use in many US states and jurisdictions around the world. The opening of these markets has led to the establishment of hundreds of cannabis production and retail firms with accompanying demand for labor, leading to concerns about spillover effects on wages from incumbents.
We study the markets for agricultural and retail labor in Washington and Colorado from 2000 to 2019 using differences-in-differences with synthetic controls. We employ employment data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, state-level demographic data from the US Census Bureau, and agricultural data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service. We use the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) for variable selection and classification and regression trees (CART) for chained imputation of missing values.
We find little-to-no evidence of a significant difference in weekly wages per worker generated by cannabis legalization: the log of the weekly wage per worker decreases by 0.013 in Washington's agricultural sector (p value 0.091) and increases by 0.059 in Washington's retail sector (p value 0.606). Results in Colorado are qualitatively similar. These results are limited in part by the short post-legalization period of the data.
Cannabis legalization is unlikely to negatively impact incumbent agriculture or retail firms through the labor market channel.
在过去几年里，大麻在美国许多州以及世界上其他一些司法管辖区已被合法化用于娱乐用途。这些市场的开放导致了数百家大麻生产和零售公司的成立，随之而来的是对劳动力的需求，这引发了人们对现有企业工资溢出效应的担忧。
我们使用合成控制法的差分法，研究了2000年至2019年华盛顿州和科罗拉多州的农业和零售劳动力市场。我们采用了就业与工资季度普查的就业数据、美国人口普查局的州级人口数据以及国家农业统计局的农业数据。我们使用最小绝对收缩和选择算子（LASSO）进行变量选择和分类，并使用分类与回归树（CART）对缺失值进行链式插补。
我们发现几乎没有证据表明大麻合法化导致每名工人的周工资有显著差异：在华盛顿州的农业部门，每名工人周工资的对数下降了0.013（p值为0.091），而在华盛顿州的零售部门则上升了0.059（p值为0.606）。科罗拉多州的结果在性质上相似。这些结果部分受到数据合法化后时间段较短的限制。
大麻合法化不太可能通过劳动力市场渠道对现有农业或零售企业产生负面影响。
