I consider the case for the minimum wage alongside (optimal) income taxes when workers differ in both wages and working hours, such that a given level of income corresponds to multiple wage rates. The minimum wage is directly targeted at the lowest-wage workers, while income taxes are at most...

We leverage U.S. county-day temperature variation combined with daily time use data to examine the effect of temperature on the timing of work. We find that warmer (colder) temperatures increase (decrease) working time during the night and decrease (increase) working time in the morning. These...

Flexible work schedules and telecommuting may help to improve the combination of work and family. This is arguably most important in households with (young) children. An open question is whether job flexibility can increase the well-being of the children, which depends, in part, on the time...

Atkinson and Stiglitz (Journal of Public Economics 1976) show that when the government has access to non-linear income taxation and consumer preferences are separable between consumption and leisure, there is no need for differentiated commodity taxation. This paper examines the empirical...

This study examines if couples time their work hours and how this work timing influences child care demand and the time that spouses jointly spend on leisure, household chores and child care. By using a innovative matching strategy, this studies identifies the timing of work hours that cannot be...

Models of labor supply derived from stochastic utility representations and discretized sets of feasible hours of work have gained popularity because they are more practical than the standard approaches based on marginal calculus. In this paper we argue that practicality is not the only feature...

Status considerations with respect to consumption give rise to negative externalities because individuals do not take into account that their decisions affect the relative consumption position of others. Further, status concerns create incentives for excessive labour supply in competitive...

This paper analyses monthly hours worked in the US over the sample period 1939m1 - 2011m10 using a cyclical long memory model; this is based on Gegenbauer processes and characterised by autocorrelations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is...

We propose an explanation of why Europeans choose to work fewer hours than Americans and also suffer higher rates of unemployment. Labor market regulations, unemployment benefits, and high levels of public consumption in many European countries reduce, ceteris paribus, the gains from being...

Globalization may impose a double-burden on low-skilled workers. On the one hand, the relative supply of low-skilled labor increases. This suppresses wages of low-skilled workers and/or increases their unemployment rates. On the other hand, low-skilled workers typically face more limited access...