Prescott (2004) argues that Europeans work much less than Americans because of higher taxes and that they would gain significantly by charging US taxes and working as much as Americans. I argue that the opposite may be true and that Americans work more than Europeans due to a coordination...

We build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work. We find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of...