What explains how much people work? Going back in time, a main fact to address is the steady reduction in hours worked. The long-run data, for the U.S. as well as for other countries, show a striking pattern whereby hours worked fall steadily by a little below a half of a percent per year,...

We examine patterns of work in the U.S. from 1973-2018 with the novel focus on days per week, using intermittent CPS samples and one ATUS sample. Among full-time workers the incidence of four-day work tripled during this period, with over 8 million more full-time workers on four-day weeks. The...

We examine the effect of the Covid pandemic on willingness to work along both the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply. Special survey questions in the Job Search Supplement of the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) allow us to elicit information about individuals' desired work...

We examine how much of the overall decline in employment between the beginning of 2020 and 2021 can be explained by excess job loss among parents of young children, and mothers specifically. Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we confirm that, in general, mothers with young...

We study business cycle fluctuations in heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium models that feature both intensive and extensive margins of labor supply. A nonconvexity in the mapping between time devoted to work and labor services combined with idiosyncratic shocks generates operative extensive...

We document a robust negative relationship between mean annual hours in an occupation and the dispersion of annual hours within that occupation. We study a unified model of occupational choice and labor supply that features heterogeneity across occupations in the return to working additional...

We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a static version where capital is fixed and...

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...

This paper uses a revealed preference approach applied to administrative data from Washington to document and characterize work-hour constraints. Workers have limited discretion over hours at a given employer, and there is substantial mismatch between workers who prefer long hours and employers...

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,...