Diminishing Returns at Work focuses on working hours - in the past and in the present, in America and in Britain. John Pencavel illustrates the proportional relationship between hours of work and outcomes such as production and health. Increases in hours of work are shown to result in smaller...

It has become orthodox in economics research to interpret the association between hourly earnings and working hours as the expression of the preferences of workers. This convention originated in H. Gregg Lewis' explanation for the decline in hours of work since the nineteenth century. His...

"The book concerns working hours - in the past and in the present, in America and in Britain. The focus is on the relation between hours of work and outcomes such as production and health. Proportional increases in hours of work are shown to result in smaller proportional increases in production...

For a century, two labor market empirical regularities characterized the movements of the hours of work, employment, and hourly compensation of American manufacturing production workers. They resembled conditional labor supply functions. Increases in employment substituted for reductions in...

Workers in cooperatives are self-employed workers and, if they resemble employees in conventional workplaces, they care about the length of their working hours. In this paper, their choice of hours is characterized as a conventional labor supply decision and a familiar hours-wage relationship is...

Observations on munition workers, most of them women, are organized to examine the relationship between their output and their working hours. The relationship is nonlinear: below an hours threshold, output is proportional to hours; above a threshold, output rises at a decreasing rate as hours...