TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hunt,Jennifer
TI  - Has Work-Sharing Worked in Germany?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5724
PY  - 1996
Y2  - August 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5724
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5724.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jennifer Hunt
Department of Economics
Rutgers University
New Jersey Hall
75 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick
NJ, 08901-1248
Tel: (732) 932-7363
E-Mail: jennifer.hunt@rutgers.edu
AB  - Starting in 1985, (West) German unions began to reduce standard hours on an industry by industry basis, in an attempt to lower unemployment.  Whether work-sharing  works - whether employment rises when hours per worker are reduced - is theoretically ambiguous.  I test this using both individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and industry data to exploit the cross-section and time-series hours variation.  For the 1984-1989 period I find that, in response to a one hour fall in standard hours, employment rose by 0.3-0.7%, but that total hours worked fell 2-3%, implying possible output losses.  As a group workers were better off, however, as the wage bill rose.  The employment growth implied by the mean standard hours decline, at most 1.1%, was not enough to bring German employment growth close to the U.S. rate.  Results for the 1990-94 period were more pessimistic.
ER  -