We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data for 2003-10 from the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, from the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both. The ATUS data minimize recall difficulties and constrain...

I develop a model with the path of labor-market outcomes exhibiting hysteresis depending on prior labor-market policy. The results suggest that attempts to transfer policies across economies lead to surprising results even if current economic outcomes in the countries appear similar. Examples of...

We examine the timing of firms' operations in a formal model of labor demand. Merging a variety of data sets from Portugal from 1995-2004, we describe temporal patterns of firms' demand for labor and estimate production-functions and relative labor-demand equations. The results demonstrate the...

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...

Major strands of recent macroeconomic theory hinge on the relation of workers' efforts to their wages, but there has been no direct general evidence on this relation. This study uses data from household surveys for 1975 and 1981 that include detailed time diaries to examine how changes in the...

There has been a wide variety of research on worker-hours substitution and the effects of various costs on the speed and extent to which labor demand adjusts. Much of this literature, though, confuses various types of fixed costs and fails to provide a guide for identifying how changes in...

We examine work patterns in the U.S. from 1973-2018, with the novel focus on days per week, using intermittent CPS samples and one ATUS sample. Among full-time workers the incidence of four-day work tripled, with 8 million additional four-day workers. Similar growth occurred in the Netherlands,...

Using two time-diary data sets each for Germany, Italy the Netherlands and the U.S. from 1985-2003, we demonstrate that Americans work more than Europeans: 1) in the market; 2) in total (market and home production) - there is no one-for-one tradeoff across countries in total work; 3) at unusual...