The Timing of Work: A Research Agenda

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9422429 Hamermesh How much people work has been a central focus of labor economics during most of the last 50 years. When people work -- the timing of work during the day -- has received almost no attention. This neglect is mainly due to the paucity of data on this issue. That is unfortunate, since changes in the distribution of work and leisure over time affect households' well-being. This project will use the only available data to examine a variety of issues in the timing of work. It is motivated by the apparent substantial changes that have occurred even during the last decade in the United States in the distribution of work hours over the work day, and by some simple cross-section evidence for the U.S. and Germany on the importance of young children in affecting spouses' joint decisions about timing leisure. The project involves an entire research agenda of studies in the general area. It includes examining: 1) how the timing of work changed between 1973 and 1991. The focus will be on decomposing changes into those produced by changes in industrial structure, demographic characteristics, and unmeasurable effects. 2) Life-cycle variation in the timing of work and how it has changed among successive cohorts of workers, using artificial cohorts of workers constructed from an 1 8-year succession of Current Population Survey data; 3) how changes in a households' demographic structure affect timing, with a particular concentration of the roles of marriage and fertility and with applications to the availability of child-care arrangements, using two-year panel data; 4) how timing varies over the business cycle, and what these changes imply about the welfare effects of unemployment; and 5) the impact of urban crime and urban disamenities generally on timing, with a focus on how changes in measurable and unmeasurable characteristics of urban areas have altered the timing of economic activity. ***