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,...

This paper studies how structural change in labor supply along the development spectrum shapes cross-country differences in hours worked. We emphasize two main forces: sectoral reallocation from self-employment to wage work, and declining fixed costs of wage work. We show that these forces are...

A substantial fraction of schools and childcare facilities in the United States closed their in-person operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. These closures may carry substantial costs to the families of affected children. In this paper, we examine the impact of school and childcare closures...

This study explores the effect of school reopenings during the COVID-19 pandemic on married women's labor supply. We proxy for in-person attendance at US K-12 schools using smartphone data from Safegraph and measure female employment, hours, and remote work using the Current Population Survey....

The COVID-19 pandemic created unexpected and prolonged disruptions to childcare access. Using survey evidence on time use by academic researchers before and after the pandemic, we analyze the extent to which greater access to either school-based or partner-provided childcare mitigated the severe...

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on labor activity using real-time data from millions of GitHub users around the world. We show that the pandemic triggered a sharp pattern of labor reallocation at both the global and regional level. Users were more likely to work on weekends...

This paper addresses two questions. First, what are the key factors that affect a consumer's lifetime budget constraint and how do they evolve over the lifecycle? Second, how do consumers respond to changes in these factors? We examine the permanent income hypothesis and the Keynesian...

In a labor market in which firms offer tied hours-wage packages and there is substantial dispersion in the wage offers associated with a particular type of job, the best job available to a worker at a point in time may pay well but require an hours level which is far from the worker's labor...

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...

The causes and consequences of state maximum hours laws for female workers, passed from the mid-1800s to the 1920s, are explored and are found to differ from a recent reinterpretation. Although maximum hours legislation reduced scheduled hours in 1920, the impact was minimal and it operated...