Hours Worked: Long-Run Trends

Jeremy Greenwood, Guillaume Vandenbroucke

NBER Working Paper No. 11629
Issued in September 2005
NBER Program(s):   EFG   LS

For 200 years the average number of hours worked per worker declined, both in the market place

and at home. Technological progress is the engine of such transformation. Three mechanisms are

stressed:

(i) The rise in real wages and its corresponding wealth effect;

(ii) The enhanced value of time off from work, due to the advent of time-using leisure goods;

(iii) The reduced need for housework, due to the introduction of time-saving appliances.

These mechanisms are incorporated into a model of household production. The notion of Edgeworth-Pareto complementarity/substitutability is key to the analysis. Numerical examples link theory and data.

This note has been prepared for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, edited

by Lawrence E. Blume and Steven N. Durlauf (London: Palgrave Macmillan).

(446 K)

This paper is available as PDF (446 K) or via email.

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX