In a new model of work schedules, employers choose the number of working hours and either dictate the exact hours to be worked or delegate that decision to workers via flextime. Workers' preferences over schedules influence their productivities. An inverted-U-shaped hours-output profile arises;...

In an effort to better understand occupational segregation by gender, scholars have begun to examine gender differences in preferences for job characteristics. We contend that a critical job characteristic has been overlooked to date: meaning at work; and in particular, meaning at work induced...

This paper uses unique firm-level panel data from Japan and provides new evidence on the possible impact on gender equality in the workplace of human resources management (HRM) practices. Specifically we consider a number of work-life balance (WLB) practices that are developed in part to enhance...

We conducted an experiment in which we hired workers under different types of contracts to evaluate how flexible working time affects on-the-job productivity in a routine job. Our approach breaks down the global impact on productivity into sorting and behavioral effects. We find that all forms...

Working remotely can complement and sometimes completely substitute conventional work at the workplace of the company. Until the COVID-19 crisis the share of remote workers was relatively low and empirical investigations show inconsistent results. The recent work has highlighted a dramatic shift...

Using three waves of a uniquely rich survey on Italian private firms, we explore the impact of female managers on the use of part-time work. Building on a literature arguing that female leaders are more sensitive to their employees' needs and more self-transcendent than their male counterparts,...

We review recent studies on management practices and their consequences for women in the workplace. First, the High Performance Work System (HPWS) is associated with greater gender diversity in the workplace while there is little evidence that the HPWS reduces the gender pay gap. Second,...

Spain, as other south-Mediterranean countries, is characterized for the predominance of split work schedules. Split work schedules typically consist of 5 hours of work in the morning (typically from 9 am to 2 pm), followed by a 2 hour break and another 3 hours of work in the afternoon/evening...

Our goal in this paper is to focus on highly educated men and women and try to explore the trade-offs between family and working career in Spain, where changes in female behavior with respect to the labor market have been relatively recent but rather important. We compare male and female...

In this paper, we investigate the association between female leadership, work organization practices and perceived gender discrimination within firms. Using data for 30 European countries for the period 1995-2010, we find that having a female "boss" is associated with lower overall gender...