This paper utilizes an economic model to analyze the determinants of legislative decision making. The model is empirically tested using the statistical technique of n-chotomous multivariate probit analysis. The legislative issue addressed is the 1973 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The amendment proposed to increase the minimum wage and the number of workers covered. The dependent variable denotes a representative's voting pattern on the minimum wage; the independent variables represent economic characteristics of a legislator's congressional district. The hypothesized linkages between the set of independent variables and legislative voting patterns were generally substantiated in the empirical tests.

This paper utilizes an economic model to analyze the determinants of legislative decision making. The model is empirically tested using the statistical technique of n-chotomous multivariate probit analysis. The legislative issue addressed is the 1973 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The amendment proposed to increase the minimum wage and the number of workers covered. The dependent variable denotes a representative's voting pattern on the minimum wage; the independent variables represent economic characteristics of a legislator's congressional district. The hypothesized linkages between the set of independent variables and legislative voting patterns were generally substantiated in the empirical tests.

Joseph Friedman, Hung-Gay Fung, Daniel A. Gerlowski, Jonathan Silberman, A Note On "State Characteristics and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment within the United States", The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 78, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 367-368