The Growth in Work Time and the Implications for Macro Policy

This paper is organized in three parts. First, we present the logic and original evidence for Phillip's Curve and NAIRU. We show that the sources of increased labor supply during the past two expansions have shifted significantly compared with the experience of the 1970's business cycle. The second part reviews the debate over whether American workers are putting in more hours at work. We developed our own measure of working time to look at male, female, and family working time since the late 1960's. In the third section, we rely on longitudinal data to show that individual workers are increasingly having more ups and downs in their employment histories over subsequent ten-year periods.