To examine the importance of the two sources of costs of adjusting labor demand, net costs (of adjusting employment) and gross costs (of hiring and firing), the author collects new sets of short monthly time series from a medium-size hospital and three manufacturing plants. Models with quadratic...

The incidence of evening and night work declined sharply in the United States between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, while the fraction of work performed at the fringes of the traditional regular working day grew. This secular decline did not result from industrial shifts or demographic...