I examine the impact of the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards on weekly hours worked between 1938 and 1950 by comparing workers in wholesale trade, a sector which was covered by the Act, with those in retail trade, a sector which was not. I find that the Act reduced hours worked,...

A structural retirement model estimated with data from the Health and Retirement Study is used to simulate the effects of policies firms might adopt to improve employment conditions for older workers and thereby encourage delayed retirement. Firm policies that effectively abolished minimum hours...

Unions play a crucial role in determining wages and employment outcomes. However, union bargaining power may also have important effects on non-pecuniary working conditions. We study the effects of right-to-work laws, which removed agency shop protection and weakened union powers on long hours...

This paper seeks to explain the greater hours worked by Americans compared to Germans in terms of forward-looking labor supply responses to differences in earnings inequality between the countries. We argue that workers choose current hours of work to gain promotions and advance in the...

Two striking facts describe work timing in the United States: a lower propensity to work evenings and nights in large metropolitan areas, and a secular decline in such work since 1973. One explanation is higher and possibly increasing crime in large areas. I link Current Population Survey data...

I investigate how the relationship between the wage and the length of the work day has changed since the 1890s among prime-aged men and women. I find that across wage deciles deciles, and within industry and occupation groups the most highly paid worked fewer hours than the lowest paid in the...

I investigate how the distribution of daily hours worked among prime-aged men has changed since the 1890s by occupational and industrial group and by the hourly wage. I find that although hours of work have fallen for all workers, the decline was disproportionately large among the lowest paid...

Data on 2225 men and 2401 women from the National Comorbidity Survey were used to examine the impact of psychiatric disorders on employment and conditional work hours and income. Two-stage instrumental variables methods were used to correct for the potential endogeneity of psychiatric disorders....

For many years California has required that most women receive time-and-a-half for hours of work beyond 8 in a given day. In 1980 this daily overtime penalty was extended to men. This change provides a unique opportunity to estimate the impact of an exogenous increase in the relative price of a...

The incidence of evening and night work declined sharply in the United States between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while the fraction of work performed at the fringes of the traditional regular working day grew. The secular decline in evening and night work did not result from industrial...