TY - JOUR
T1 - How do hours worked vary with income? cross-country evidence and implications
AU - Bick, Alexander
AU - Fuchs-Schündeln, Nicola
AU - Lagakos, David
N1 - Funding Information:
* Bick: W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, PO Box 879801, Tempe, AZ 85287 (email: alexander.bick@asu.edu); Fuchs-Schündeln: House of Finance, Goethe University Frankfurt, Theodor-W-Adorno Platz 3, 60323 Frankfurt, Germany, CFS, and CEPR (email: fuchs@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de); Lagakos: UC-San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., #0508, La Jolla, CA 92093, and NBER (email: lagakos@ucsd.edu). This paper was accepted to the AER under the guidance of Mark Aguiar, Coeditor. We thank Andy Atkeson, David Atkin, Angus Deaton, Maya Eden, Chad Jones, Pete Klenow, Aart Kraay, Norman Loayza, Alan Manning, Valerie Ramey, Richard Rogerson, Andres Santos, Matthias Schündeln, Jesse Shapiro, three anonymous referees, as well as numerous conference and seminar participants for helpful comments and suggestions. Paul Reimers provided truly outstanding research assistance. For further excellent research assistance we thank Caleb Johnson, Patrick Kiernan, Andre Ortseifen, Ang Xing Yi, and Shu Zhang. Fuchs-Schündeln gratefully acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council under Starting Grant 262116, and from the Cluster of Excellence “Formation of Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt. All potential errors are our own. We declare that we have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
PY - 2018/1
Y1 - 2018/1
N2 - This paper builds a new internationally comparable database of hours worked to measure how hours vary with income across and within countries. We document that average hours worked per adult are substantially higher in low-income countries than in high-income countries. The pattern of decreasing hours with aggregate income holds for both men and women, for adults of all ages and education levels, and along both the extensive and intensive margin. Within countries, hours worked per worker are also decreasing in the individual wage for most countries, though in the richest countries, hours worked are flat or increasing in the wage. One implication of our fndings is that aggregate productivity and welfare differences across countries are larger than currently thought.
AB - This paper builds a new internationally comparable database of hours worked to measure how hours vary with income across and within countries. We document that average hours worked per adult are substantially higher in low-income countries than in high-income countries. The pattern of decreasing hours with aggregate income holds for both men and women, for adults of all ages and education levels, and along both the extensive and intensive margin. Within countries, hours worked per worker are also decreasing in the individual wage for most countries, though in the richest countries, hours worked are flat or increasing in the wage. One implication of our fndings is that aggregate productivity and welfare differences across countries are larger than currently thought.
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U2 - 10.1257/aer.20151720
DO - 10.1257/aer.20151720
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85040081948
VL - 108
SP - 170
EP - 199
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
SN - 0002-8282
IS - 1
ER -