What explains how much people work? Going back in time, a main fact to address is the steady reduction in hours worked. The long-run data, for the U.S. as well as for other countries, show a striking pattern whereby hours worked fall steadily by a little below a half of a percent per year,...

This text develops a bargaining trade union model which includes working time and wages in the set of negotiated variables, the "right to manage" of the firm being limited to employment decision. The model allows for time varying effectiveness of workers and fixed costs of labor and considers a...

This paper addresses the on-going controversy regarding whether to allow private sector employers to substitute compensatory (comp) time for premium pay for workers' overtime work hours. It employs data from a unique survey that actually asked over 800 workers their preference for pay vs. future...

This paper uses Canadian matched employer-employee data to show that working hours are gross complements in production rather than perfect substitutes, as is typically assumed. We exploit within-establishment and individual-level variation in hours and wages to document novel evidence consistent...

We examine the timing of firms' operations in a formal model of labor demand. Merging a variety of data sets from Portugal from 1995-2004, we describe temporal patterns of firms' demand for labor and estimate production-functions and relative labor-demand equations. The results demonstrate the...