Search Results
Journal Article
Changes in hours worked, 1950?2000
This article describes changes in the number of average weekly hours of market work per person in the United States since World War II. Overall, this number has been roughly constant; for various groups, however, it has shifted dramatically - from males to females, from older people to younger people, and from single- to married-person households. The article provides a detailed look at how the lifetime pattern of work hours has changed since 1950 for different demographic groups. This article also documents several factors that lead to the reallocation of hours worked across groups: ...
Working Paper
The business cycle and the life cycle
The paper documents how cyclical fluctuations in market work vary over the life cycle and then assesses the predictions of a life-cycle version of the growth model for those observations. The analysis yields a simple but striking finding. The main discrepancy between the model and that data lies in the inability of the model to account for fluctuations in hours for individuals in the first half of their life cycle. The predictions for those in the latter half of the life cycle are quite close to the data.
Report
A note on labor contracts with private information and household production
A classic result in the theory of implicit contract models with asymmetric information is that ?underemployment? results if and only if leisure is an inferior good. We introduce household production into the standard implicit contract model and show that we can have underemployment at the same time that leisure is a normal good.
Report
Homework in macroeconomics: household production and aggregate fluctuations
This paper explores some macroeconomic implications of including household production in an otherwise standard real business cycle model. We calibrate the model based on microeconomic evidence and long run considerations, simulate it, and examine its statistical properties Our finding is that introducing home production significantly improves the quantitative performance of the standard model along several dimensions. It also implies a very different interpretation of the nature of aggregate fluctuations.
Working Paper
Long-term changes in labor supply and taxes: evidence from OECD countries, 1956-2004
We document large differences in trend changes in hours worked across OECD countries over the period 1956-2004. We then assess the extent to which these changes are consistent with the intratemporal first order condition from the neoclassical growth model. We find large and trending deviations from this condition, and that the model can account for virtually none of the changes in hours worked. We then extend the model to incorporate observed changes in taxes. Our findings suggest that taxes can account for much of the variation in hours worked both over time and across countries.
Report
On the political economy of education subsidies
Standard models of public education provision predict an implicit transfer of resources from higher income individuals toward lower income individuals. Many studies have documented that public higher education involves a transfer in the reverse direction. We show that this pattern of redistribution is an equilibrium outcome in a model in which education is only partially publicly provided and individuals vote over the extent to which it is subsidized. We show that increased inequality in the income distribution makes this outcome more likely and that the efficiency implications of this ...
Conference Paper
The macroeconomic transition to high household debt - comments
Work More, Make Much More? The Relationship between Lifetime Hours Worked and Lifetime Earnings
An analysis suggests that the hours that male workers spend on the job over a career is associated with both higher lifetime earnings and higher earnings growth.
Journal Article
Changes in hours worked since 1950
Changes in hours worked since 1950; This article describes changes in the number of average weekly hours of market work per person in the United States since World War II. Overall, this number has been roughly constant; for various groups, however, it has shifted dramatically from males to females, from older people to younger people, and from single- to married-person households. The article provides a unique look at how the lifetime pattern of work hours has changed since 1950 for different demographic groups. The article also documents several factors that may be related to the changes in ...