Constraints on the Desired Hours of Work of British Men.

This paper investigates constraints on desired hours of work using information on hours preferences from the British Household Panel Survey for 1991. Over a third of male manual workers would prefer to work fewer hours at the prevailing wage than they do and the authors estimate that, on average, desired hours per week are 4.3 hours lower than actual hours. They hypothesise that job security and scarcity of alternative job opportunities enable employers to set hours constraints above employee preferences and find that the minimum hours constraints set by firms are an increasing function of the unemployment rate an individual faces. Copyright 1997 by Royal Economic Society.