Understanding the Reasons for and Impact of Legislatively Mandated Benefits for Selected Workers

Abstract

Judging by the long and growing list of relevant state and federal initiatives, the demand for legislative measures designed to benefit workers must be quite strong. In her richly nuanced and impressively comprehensive article, Accommodation Mandates, Christine Jolls develops the theoretical framework needed to analyze the effect of laws mandating employers to provide benefits to particular, presumably disadvantaged, groups of workers. Specifically, Jolls enriches the existing economic model of universal mandates in order to analyze the impact on wages and employment of these targeted labor-market interventions. Section II of this comment begins by describing the outlines of Jolls' approach and by highlighting her major theoretical conclusions. Section III attempts to illustrate the value of her theoretical framework by applying it to a few areas that Jolls did not explore - the law of sex harassment and disparate impact. Section IV raises some broad questions about why accommodation mandates would be adopted if they don't entirely advance the interests of their intended beneficiaries as the Jollsian framework suggests. Section V explores some of the limits of partial equilibrium analysis of labor market interventions in light of work examining the distributional impact of minimum wage laws and recent controversial empirical work questioning the theoretical predictions of such analyses. Section VI concludes with some general comments on whether the adoption of accommodation mandates is sensible public policy.