The Timing of Work: A Research Agenda

在过去50年的大部分时间里，人们工作多少一直是劳动经济学的中心焦点。人们什么时候工作——一天中工作的时间——几乎没有受到关注。这种忽视主要是由于缺乏关于这个问题的数据。这是不幸的，因为随着时间的推移，工作和休闲分配的变化会影响家庭的幸福。该项目将使用唯一可用的数据来检查工作时间中的各种问题。它的动机是，即使在过去十年中，美国工作日的工作时间分配也发生了明显的实质性变化，而且美国和德国的一些简单的横截面证据表明，幼儿在影响配偶共同决定休闲时间方面的重要性。该项目涉及一般领域研究的整个研究议程。它包括检查：1)工作时间在1973年到1991年间是如何变化的。重点是将变化分解为产业结构变化、人口特征变化和不可测量影响变化所产生的变化。2)使用从连续18年的当前人口调查数据构建的人工工人队列，研究工作时间的生命周期变化及其在连续工人队列中的变化情况；3)家庭人口结构的变化如何影响时间，特别是婚姻和生育的作用，以及儿童保育安排的可用性，使用两年的面板数据；4)时间在商业周期中是如何变化的，这些变化对失业的福利影响意味着什么；5)城市犯罪和城市不满通常对时间的影响，重点关注城市地区可测量和不可测量特征的变化如何改变经济活动的时间。＊＊＊

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. ***