Work and Television

Nowadays, people in OECD countries spend about as much time watching television as earning a living. In this Paper I report a puzzling fact about those time uses: television viewing and work hours are positively correlated across countries. A simple model based on complementarities in the organization of free time is then developed that explains such a pattern as resulting from multiple equilibria. All equilibria can be inversely Pareto-ranked by their amount of television viewing. Arguments are offered to explain why some countries may have settled in a Pareto-inferior equilibrium.