We use national labor force surveys from 1983 through 2011 to construct hours worked per person on the aggregate level and for different demographic groups for 18 European countries and the US. We find that Europeans work 19% fewer hours than US citizens. Differences in weeks worked and in the...

We use national labor force surveys from 1983 through 2011 to construct hours worked per person on the aggregate level and for different demographic groups for 18 European countries and the US. We find that Europeans work 19% fewer hours than US citizens. Differences in weeks worked and in the...

We document that fluctuations in part-time employment play a major role in movements in hours per worker, especially during cyclical swings in the labor market. Building on this result, we propose a novel representation of the intensive margin based on a stock-flow framework. The evolution of...

Americans work more than Europeans. Using micro data from the U.S. and 17 European countries, we study the contributions from demographic subgroups to these aggregate level differences. We document that women are typically the largest contributors to the discrepancy in work hours. We also...

This paper evaluates the implications for employment, productivity and wages of allowing for more flexibility in weekly hours worked introduced in the recent Spanish labour market reform ("the 2012 reform"). A crucial aspect of the model will be the extent to which firms will be able to choose...

This paper documents the heterogeneity in labor market volatility across ages and gender in the United States over 1976-2014. We separate fluctuations in hours worked into fluctuations in the average number of hours per worker (the intensive margin) and fluctuations in the number of individuals...

The cyclical behavior of hours of work, wages, and consumption does not conform with the prediction of the representative agent with standard preferences. The residual in the intra-temporal first-order condition for commodity consumption and leisure is often viewed as a failure of labor-market...

The intensity of use of overtime hours has risen markedly since the early 1990s. Recent research suggests that there has been a structural break in manufacturing productivity beginning in the 1990s in the US. This paper investigates how a given increase or decrease in hours - measured here as...

In this article, we document that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Conference Board’s Total Economy Database (TED) have substantially revised their measures of hours worked over time. Relying on the data used by Rogerson (2006) and Ohanian et al....