At least since 1870 hours worked per worker declined and real wages increased in many of today's industrialized countries. The dual nature of technological progress in conjunction with a consumption-leisure complementarity explains these stylized facts. Technological progress drives real wages...

The paper discusses the European Union as a union of primarily small European states, a union whose parallel emphasis on efficiency and fairness, including deep respect for human rights, holds the key to Europe's economic and social advances over the years. The paper shows that adjusting...

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 study identifies the timing of work hours that cannot be...

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 characterized by auto-correlations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is...

We examine the redistributive impact of working time regulations in an economy with unequal lifetimes. It is shown that uniform working time reductions, when uncompensated (i.e. constant hourly wage), can reduce inequalities in realized lifetime well-being between short-lived and long-lived...

We study the causal effect of a change in working times on overweight and obesity drawing from evidence from a national policy (the Aubry reform) implemented in the beginning of the past decade in France that reduced the work week from 39 to 35 hours, or 184 hours per year. We draw on two...

Using employer-employee panel data, we provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK's Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, our data enables us to address the cyclical composition of jobs. We show that firms were able to respond to the Great...

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...

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 shows that increases in the minimum wage rate can have ambiguous effects on the working hours and welfare of employed workers in competitive labor markets. The reason is that employers may not comply with the minimum wage legislation and instead pay a lower subminimum wage rate. If...