Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge Curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching...

Four years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the labor market remains historically weak. Many observers have concluded that "structural" impediments to recovery bear some of the blame. This paper reviews such structural explanations. I find that there is little evidence supporting...

I develop a model with the path of labor-market outcomes exhibiting hysteresis depending on prior labor-market policy. The results suggest that attempts to transfer policies across economies lead to surprising results even if current economic outcomes in the countries appear similar. Examples of...

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...

There has been a wide variety of research on worker-hours substitution and the effects of various costs on the speed and extent to which labor demand adjusts. Much of this literature, though, confuses various types of fixed costs and fails to provide a guide for identifying how changes in...

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....

Using time-diary data from 25 countries, we demonstrate that there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day -- the sum of work for pay and work at home. In rich northern countries on four continents, including the United...

Data on 2225 men and 2401 women from the National Comorbidity Survey were used to examine the impact of psychiatric disorders on employment and conditional work hours and income. Two-stage instrumental variables methods were used to correct for the potential endogeneity of psychiatric disorders....

This paper examines the role that work incentives play in the determination of work hours. Following previous research by Lang (1989), we use a conventional efficiency wage model to analyze how firms respond to worker preferences regarding wage-hours packages. We find that when workers are...

We document a robust negative relationship between the log of mean annual hours in an occupation and the standard deviation of log annual hours within that occupation. We develop a unified model of occupational choice and labor supply that features heterogeneity across occupations in the return...