We show that U.S. manufacturing wages during the Great Depression were importantly determined by forces on firms' intensive margins. Short-run changes in work intensity and the longer-term goal of restoring full potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth. By contrast, the...

The share of overtime hours within total hours worked in Britain has declined from 4.8% to 2.9% between 1999 and 2018. This is equivalent to 321 thousand full-time jobs. We investigate this decline focussing on full-time and part-time males and females together with overtime pay effects that...

Significant numbers of employees work more hours in the workplace than their contract stipulates. Such overtime work can either be paid or unpaid. This research considers overtime working in Germany and the UK and shows that the quantitative significance of both paid and unpaid overtime is...

On their intensive margins, firms in the British engineering industry adjusted to the severe falls in demand during the 1930s Depression by cutting hours of work. This provided an important means of reducing labour input and marginal labour costs, through movements from overtime to short-time...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and amplitudes. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ frequency domain methods that allow us...