Prevailing Wage Regulations and School Construction Costs: Cumulative Evidence from British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The effect of prevailing wage laws on the cost of public construction has been the subject of an ongoing public policy debate. We measure this effect by comparing the public/private construction cost differential for schools built before and after British Columbia's Skills Development and Fair Wage Policy. Regression results indicate that public schools were 40.5 percent more expensive to build prior to the policy. This differential was 40.1 percent after the policy's enforcement. However, this change is not statistically significant. Regression results also indicate a stable construction cost function over the policy period. These results indicate that the effect of fair wage requirements was not different from zero in terms of magnitude or statistical significance. Combining these results with the findings of our previous research provides a comprehensive view regarding the effect of the British Columbian prevailing wage policy on school construction. This body of research, utilizing a variety of statistical methods, provides consistent evidence indicating that a relatively strong prevailing wage policy was not associated with changes in the efficiency or productivity of construction that contributes to increased building 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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".