This paper extends Lucas and Prescott's (1974) search model to develop a notion of rest unemployment. The economy consists of a continuum of labor markets, each of which produces a heterogeneous good. There is a constant returns to scale production technology in each labor market, but labor...

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...

In this paper we first document inequality trends in wages, hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the last twenty years. We generally find that inequality was relatively stable in West Germany until the German unification (which happened politically in 1990 and in our...

This paper seeks to explain the greater hours worked by Americans compared to Germans in terms of forward-looking labor supply responses to differences in earnings inequality between the countries. We argue that workers choose current hours of work to gain promotions and advance in the...

Using Current Population Survey data, I demonstrate a 15-percentage point wage disadvantage among academics compared to all other doctorate-holders with the same demographics. Time-diary data show that academics' work hours are distributed more evenly over the week and day, although their total...

Comparing measures of work time in the recall CPS-ASEC data with contemporaneous measures reveals many logical inconsistencies and probable errors. About 8 percent of ASEC respondents report weeks worked last year that contradict their current work histories in the Basic monthly interviews; the...

The COVID-19 pandemic instigated a big shift in working arrangements. I first describe the scale of this shift in the United States, drawing on the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes and other sources. I then review differences, circa 2023, in work-from-home rates across industries,...