States that enact marijuana legalization see jobs in the agriculture sector increase more than they would have without the policy change, according to a new economic analysis from researchers at Texas Tech University.
The results, which were presented at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association’s 2026 meeting last month, found a 9 percent uptick in agriculture sector employment in states that legalized cannabis—though wages did not increase proportionately due to factors that researchers determined are likely unrelated.
To investigate the relationship between marijuana legalization and industry-specific economic trends, analysts looked at state-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from 1990 to 2024.
Applying a synthetic difference-in-difference (SDID) estimator, the researchers assessed “both aggregate and cohort-specific average treatment effects” on the target jurisdictions.
“The policy effectively increased agricultural employment.”
“Our baseline results indicate that legalization significantly increased agricultural employment by approximately 9 percent, while having no statistically significant effect on agricultural wages, all-industry employment, or economy-wide wages,” the study found.
“The baseline SDID estimates indicate that the policy achieved its primary objective of expanding agricultural employment, with treated counties experiencing an approximately 9 percent increase in agricultural employment relative to the synthetic
Read full article on Marijuana Moment
