December 1, 1996 Portugal introduced a new law on working hours which gradually reduced the standard workweek from 44 hours to 40 hours. We study how this mandatory working hours reduction affected employment and earnings of workers involved. We find for workers who were affected by the new law...

The current crisis, while of a global nature, has affected national labor markets to a varying extent. While some countries have experienced a steep increase in unemployment, employment in other developed economies has not fallen in parallel with a significant decline in GDP. Our analysis shows...

Increases in standard hours have been a contentious policy issue in Germany. Whilst this might directly lead to a substitution of workers by hours, there may also be a positive employment effect due to reduced costs. Moreover, the response of firms differs between firms which offer overtime and...

In 2012, in the midst of a recession, a labour law reform in Portugal allowed firms to reduce the overtime premium paid to their workers by 50% or more. Until then, overtime premiums were set by law at a relatively high level and could not be cut unilaterally. We analyse matched...

In recent years the question of overtime work has become increasingly relevant as part of the wider issue of the reduction in the working day. A direct relation between policies aiming at reducing working hours, and increases in overtime work neutralising their beneficial effects on employment,...

Macro-level changes can have substantial effects on the distribution of resources at the household level. While it is possible to speculate about which groups are likely to be hardesthit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking. This paper suggests a straightforward...

In this paper, we analyze firm demand for flexible jobs by exploiting the language used to describe work arrangements in job vacancies. We take a supervised machine learning approach to classify the work arrangements described in more than 46 million UK job vacancies. We highlight the existence...

We study the consequences of a working time reduction (WTR hereafter) in an exogenous growth model with unemployment (due to efficiency wage considerations) and a renewable natural resource. The resource is an essential input whose marginal productivity is bounded by physical laws. In the...