Standard hours, a major component of total work hours, vary considerably across Europe. Many countries lowered their standard work hours during the 1980s and 1990s, attempting to boost employment by splitting up a fixed number of worker-hours among more workers. Germany has seen a partial...

Achieving low unemployment in an environment of weak growth is a major policy challenge; a more egalitarian distribution of hours worked could be the key to solving it. Whether worksharing actually increases employment, however, has been debated controversially. In this article we present...

The effect of demographic change on the labor force and on fiscal revenues is topical in light of potential pension shortfalls. This paper evaluates the effect of demographic changes between 2010 and 2030 on labor force participation and government budgets in the EU-27. Our analysis involves the...

The effect of demographic change on the labor force and on fiscal revenues is topical in light of potential pension shortfalls. This paper evaluates the effect of demographic changes between 2010 and 2030 on labor force participation and government budgets in the EU-27. Our analysis involves the...

While economic studies often assume that labor markets are in equilibrium, there may be specialized labor markets that are likely in disequilibrium. We develop a new methodology to improve the estimation of a reduced form disequilibrium model from the existing models by incorporating...

Current estimates suggest that over the coming decades, slower population growth and lower labor force participation will constrain the supply of labor in the U.S. The U.S. labor force will also become more diverse as immigration and fertility trends increase the size of minority populations....

Concurrently with a steady increase of the supply of college educated workers, recent evidence for the U.S. indicated a decline in the demand for and the real wages of this group after 2000. We investigate empirically, whether there has been a similar trend in Germany. Based on comprehensive,...

This paper describes IZAΨMOD, the policy microsimulation model of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). The model uses household microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and firm data from the German linked employer-employee dataset LIAB. IZAΨMOD consists of three components:...

It has become orthodox in economics research to interpret the association between hourly earnings and working hours as the expression of the preferences of workers. This convention originated in H. Gregg Lewis' explanation for the decline in hours of work since the nineteenth century. His...