Working time over the 20th century: A macroeconomic perspective.

摘要

Over the last 130 years weekly hours worked per employed person, the workweek length, decreased by 41 percent in today's advanced industrialized countries. The number of employed persons in the population 15 or older, the employment rate, displays large movements but no clear secular pattern. These facts motivated the question: What accounts for the large decrease in the workweek length and the development of the employment rate?; The first essay presents ex ante promising theories. It considers among others: technological progress, proportional taxes, workweek length constraints, and changes in the sectoral composition of the economy. The main finding is that all theories fail to account for the facts. Some of the theories predict a constant workweek length; others that allow for a decrease of the workweek length have counterfactual implications.; Essay two proposes an answer to the question in a dynamic general equilibrium framework. Making use of the observation that employed persons are not a homogenous group, supervisory workers and production workers are introduced. Both types of workers get more productive over time. The productivity gains of supervisors lead to the decrease in the workweek length. In a calibrated version of the model, productivity gains of supervisors account for a large fraction of the decline in the workweek length of Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The model, augmented to include taxes, government spending, and technological progress, captures the movement in the employment rates of the three countries.; Essay three addresses the question: What is the impact of labor unions on working time? In the model labor unions maximize the utility of the average employed person through the choice of the workweek length. Under reasonable parameter restrictions, the essay finds that the presence of labor unions implies a shorter workweek length compared to a non-union economy. The model is then applied to the United Kingdom for the period 1910 to 1930. Augmented with taxes and a switch from an economy without unions to one with unions as decision makers, the model accounts for the observed workweek length and employment rate decline.