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...

In the U.S. the relationship between hours worked and employee earnings has been reversed. Whereas the highest earners used to work the shortest hours, now they work the longest hours. This study examines whether such a reversal has occurred elsewhere, namely, Japan. Since the early 1990s the...

In this paper I explore the flexibility of the work week in the United States, using the FIFA Soccer World Cup as a natural experiment. My empirical strategy exploits the exogenous variation that arises due to which country hosts the World Cup, as this will determine the time games are broadcast...

France has experienced massive changes in its regulation of working time during the last decade. These changes generate natural experiments that may help to study a variety of issues in labor economics, including work sharing effect on job creation or productivity, labor relations or adaptation...

Legally mandated reductions in the workweek can be either a constraint on individuals' choice or a tool to coordinate individuals' preferences for lower work hours. We confront these two hypotheses by studying the consequences of the workweek reduction in France from 39 to 35 hours, which was...

This paper uses British panel data to investigate single women’s labour supply changes in response to three tax and benefit policy reforms that occurred in the 1990s. These reforms changed individuals' work incentives and we use them to identify changes in labour supply. We find evidence of...

We investigate spillovers in spousal labour supply exploiting independent variation in hours worked generated by the introduction of the shorter workweek in France in the late 1990s. We find that female and male employees treated by the shorter legal workweek reduce their weekly labour supply by...

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...

Using previously unexploited data on time scheduling in the employment and household contexts, we investigate the effect of flexible working on couples' coordination of their daily work time schedules in the UK. We consider three distinct dimensions of flexible working: flexibility of daily...

Contrary to much of the established literature, this paper finds that though many older workers would prefer to reduce their working hours (the overemployed), there is a significant group who would like to work longer hours (the underemployed). And contrary to the assumption that the...