This paper employs monthly, industry-level data in a study of Depression-era labor markets. The underlying analytical framework is one in which, as in Lucas (1970), employers can vary total labor input not only by changing the number of workers but also by varying the length of the work-week....

We document that declining hours worked are the primary driver of widening inequality in the bottom half of the male labor earnings distribution in the United States over the past 52 years. This decline in hours is heavily concentrated in recessions: hours and earnings at the bottom fall sharply...

The employment and hours worked of young individuals fluctuate much more over the business cycle than those of prime-aged individuals. Understanding the mechanism underlying this observation is key to explaining the volatility of aggregate hours over the cycle. We argue that the joint behavior...

Why did the Japanese slowdown of the 90s last so long if none of the shocks that hit the Japanese economy had a comparable persistence? In this paper, I use the Comin and Gertler (2006) model of medium term fluctuations to explore whether their endogenous technology mechanisms can amplify and...

This paper analyzes the quality of VAR-based procedures for estimating the response of the economy to a shock. We focus on two key issues. First, do VAR-based confidence intervals accurately reflect the actual degree of sampling uncertainty associated with impulse response functions? Second,...

Structural vector autoregressions give conflicting results on the effects of technology shocks on hours. The results depend crucially on the assumed data generating process for hours per capita. We show that the standard measure of hours per capita has significant low frequency movements that...

We use the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) 2003-12 to estimate time spent by workers in non-work while on the job. Non-work time is substantial and varies positively with the local unemployment rate. While average time spent by workers in non-work conditional on any positive amount rises with...

During the Great Depression of 1930s, changes in the workweek drove a larger portion of changes in total labor input than in other decades. Work-sharing policies appear to be responsible. Hoover created various work-sharing committees lead by key industrialists, which pushed for shorter...

We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data for 2003-10 from the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, from the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both. The ATUS data minimize recall difficulties and constrain...

We build a new quarterly dataset of aggregate hours worked consistent with standard NIPA constructs for 14 OECD countries over the last fifty years. We find that cyclical features of labor markets across countries differ markedly from the accepted empirical facts reported in the literature based...