TY  - JOUR
AU  - Greenwood,Jeremy
AU  - Vandenbroucke,Guillaume
TI  - Hours Worked: Long-Run Trends
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11629
PY  - 2005
Y2  - September 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11629
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11629.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jeremy Greenwood
Department of Economics
University of Pennsylvania
3718 Locust Walk
McNeil Building, Rm 160
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6297
Tel: 215/898-1505
Fax: 215/746-2947
E-Mail: do-not-use@jeremygreenwood.net

Guillaume Vandenbroucke
University of Southern California
Department of Economics, KAP 300
3620 South Vermont Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0253
Tel: +1 213 740 2098
E-Mail: vandenbr@usc.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2005-09-19
AB  - 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).
ER  -