The Effects of Prevailing Wage Regulations on Construction Efficiency in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the effect of prevailing wage legislation on the efficiency of school construction. Specifically, stochastic frontier regression and British Columbian construction data are used to measure the effect of the introduction and expansion of prevailing wage requirements on technical efficiency, or the ability of builders to obtain maximum output from available resources. Results indicate that average technical efficiency for all construction projects in the sample is 94.6%. Average efficiency for projects covered by the introductory stage of British Columbia's construction wage legislation is 86.6%. By the time of the expansion of the wage policy 17 months later, the average efficiency of covered projects increased to 99.8%. These findings suggest that the introduction of prevailing wage laws disrupted construction efficiency. However, in a relatively short period, the construction industry adjusted to wage requirements by increasing overall efficiency. A short-term decrease in construction efficiency, followed by a sharp and durable increase, supports that view that prevailing wage laws are not associated with higher, long-term construction costs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".