To reduce the incidence of very long working hours, Korea is gradually implementing a major working-time reform, which lowers the statutory limit on total weekly working hours from 68 to 52 between 2018-2021. This paper provides a preliminary assessment of the reform with three key insights....

This paper provides a first assessment of the causal impact of the 2018-2021 reform in Korea meant to combat its long working-hour culture. The reform consists of lowering the statutory limit on total weekly working hours from 68 to 52. We apply a difference-in-difference approach in which we...

We examine patterns of work in the U.S. from 1973-2018 with the novel focus on days per week, using intermittent CPS samples and one ATUS sample. Among full-time workers the incidence of four-day work tripled during this period, with over 8 million more full-time workers on four-day weeks. The...

How would people spend time if confronted by permanent declines in market work? We identify preferences off exogenous cuts in legislated standard hours that raised employers' overtime costs in Japan around 1990 and Korea in the early 2000s. Using time-diaries from before and after these shocks,...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we consider the impact of uncertainty and real options on the decision of...

In 2012, in the midst of a recession, a labour law reform in Portugal allowed firms to reduce the overtime premium paid to their workers by 50% or more. Until then, overtime premiums were set by law at a relatively high level and could not be cut unilaterally. We analyse matched...

This study estimates the causal effect of working hours on health. We deal with the endogeneity of working hours through instrumental variables techniques. In particular, we exploit exogenous variation in working hours from statutory workweek regulations in the German public sector as an...

Contrary to much of the established literature, this paper finds that though many older workers would prefer to reduce their working hours (the overemployed), there is a significant group who would like to work longer hours (the underemployed). And contrary to the assumption that the...