Days of Work Over a Half Century: The Rise of the Four-day Week / Daniel S. Hamermesh, Jeff Biddle.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hamermesh, Daniel S.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Biddle, Jeff.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30106.

NBER working paper series no. w30106

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

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 same growth occurred in the Netherlands, Germany, and South Korea. The rise was not due to changes in demographics or industrial structure. Four-day full-time work is more common among less educated, younger, and white non-Hispanic workers, among men, natives, and people with young children; and among police and firefighters, health-care workers, and in eating/drinking places. Based on an equilibrium model of its prevalence, we show that it results more from workers' preferences and/or daily fixed costs of working than from employers' production costs. We verify the implication that the wage penalty for four-day work is greater where such work is more prevalent, and we show that the penalty has diminished over time.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2022.