Search

The labor force surveys (LFS) of all EU countries underwent a substantial redesign in January 2021. To ensure coherent labor market time series for the main indicators in the Norwegian LFS, we model the impact of the redesign. We use a state-space model that takes explicit account of the rotating pattern of the LFS. We also include auxiliary variables related to employment and unemployment that are highly correlated with the LFS variables we consider. The results of a parallel run are also included in the model. The purpose of the article is to quantify the structural breaks due to the redesign. This article makes two contributions to the literature on the effects of redesign in surveys with a rotating panel, such as the LFS. First, we suggest a symmetric specification of the process of the wave-specific effects. Second, we account for substantial fluctuations in the labor force estimates due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the time around the LFS redesign by applying time-varying hyperparameters for both the LFS variables and the auxiliary variables. The specification with time-varying hyperparameters shows a better fit compared to the specification with time-invariant hyperparameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementing an efficient performance monitoring system is necessary to complete a facility building project on time, on budget, and by established standards and specifications. Inappropriate system monitoring process could lead to project failures such as delay which commonly occurs. If the delay happens, it is necessary to accelerate work productivity to overcome it. Earned value method (EVM) is one of the suggested global standards for measuring project performance. It effectively combines scope, cost, and schedule metrics and can provide a clear picture of the state of the project as of the control date. It also predicts the time prolong and completion budget. This paper proposes a guideline to implement EVM as a decision baseline on acceleration solutions for construction project scheduling by conducting an article review, since the EVM can predict the project’s time estimates at completion (TE). According to the guideline, when arranging network planning based on construction actual work performed, it is essential to use TE as the completion time. From the critical activities in network planning, contractors can conduct the acceleration process such as additional work hours (overtime) and additional manpower. This acceleration scenario later could be implemented in the project as the solution to overcome the delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Smart Rail Transit is the property of Smart Rail Transit Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The population of unmarried heterosexual cohabiting women has nearly tripled in the US over the past two decades. While previous studies have tended to ignore these women, or treat them as single/married, this paper examines the labor supply responses of cohabiting women, single women, and married women from 1996 to 2016 using March-CPS. A comparison of the three groups finds that cohabiting women have the lowest labor force participation elasticity with respect to after-tax wages. That cohabiting women would work more hours if their partners earned more annually and married women would not, points to another behavioral difference between the two groups. Results from ATUS-CPS 2003–2017 further imply that cohabiting women share some of the same characteristics of single and married women. We conclude that unmarried heterosexual cohabiting women should be classified as a separate female group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 established the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program within the United States. TANF mandated 60‐month lifetime time limits for federal cash assistance dollars. Because states reserve the right to set their own stricter or more generous time limits, the 60‐month lifetime limit did not bind in all cases. In recent years, however, several states imposed TANF time limits for the first time or made existing time limits more stringent. Using administrative and survey data, I find that stricter time limits decrease TANF participation within the past 12 months by 26%. Unlike previous research, I find heterogeneous effects of time limits on labor supply. I show that expected effects on employment and earnings decrease—and eventually become negative—as a state's unemployment rate increases. Evidence suggests that removing welfare recipients from TANF during periods of high unemployment inhibits their access to financial resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one-of-a-kind production (OKP), how to coordinate workforce allocations to obtain reasonable man-hour has the practical significance. However, plenty of variables and complicated operation relationships are involved, which implies the man-hour optimisation in OKP belongs to a constrained mixed discrete optimisation problem. In this article, to deal with the man-hour optimisation in large-scale OKP which often refers to complex production, e.g. shipbuilding, we introduce a top-down refinement method to specialise the product design and production decomposition in OKP, which also indicates the operation relationships of the interim product production processes. Consequently, we suggest three basic task structures which are with wide adaptability in OKP industry: tandem structure, parallel structure and double-level-nested parallel structure. Meanwhile, for the double-level-nested parallel structure, a method based on matrix real-coded genetic algorithm and dynamic programming is presented to solve the man-hour optimisation and labour force allocation problem. Through the case studies, including an industrial implementation in the shipbuilding interim product (i.e. a hull block) production, our optimisation method demonstrates significant potential to improve the production efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how on-demand service workers on digital platforms make and live their time in the case of China's food delivery industry. Using ethnographic data, the study elucidated multiple facets of couriers' temporality in their struggle to meet the exacting delivery time imposed by platforms while moving through biased urban spaces as marginalized temporal subjects. It is argued that a new temporal order, referred to as temporal arbitrage in this study, has been normalized in the recent platform economy. It shifts the customer's cultural expectation to on-demand service at the expense of an increasingly hectic tempo for the workers. We demonstrate the mundane, and sometimes opportunistic, tactics deployed by workers to reconstruct their temporality. The article connects the workers' temporality to the urban spaces, digital work process, and socioeconomic structures. It fills an important research gap by addressing the under-explored yet essential temporal dimensions in the expanding "just-in-time" labor force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses a mathematical model with time delay for the labor force on a market. Three variables are taken into account: the number of unemployed and employed persons in the market and the number of new vacancies created by the government and the private sector, which is based on a past value of the unemployment number in the creation of new vacancies. The positivity of the solutions is examined and the existence of a unique equilibrium point of the mathematical model is proved. A local stability analysis is undertaken, showing that the unique equilibrium is locally asymptotically stable, for any value of the time delay. Numerical simulations are carried out which substantiate the theoretical statements and suggest that the positive equilibrium point is globally asymptotically stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The difference between the working hours of natives and immigrants has begun to attract a great deal of attention in U.S. migration research, but this phenomenon has yet to be studied in a European context. In this article, we examine this difference in working hours for 13 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the U.K.) for the period 1995–2013. Contrary to popular belief, we find that immigrants usually work fewer hours than natives in most of the countries studied. In addition, we observe that native workers in Western and Southern Europe have, over time, tended to increase their number of hours worked compared to immigrants. However, the opposite is true is for Northern Europe, where natives' working hours have generally decreased compared to immigrants, even following the global economic crisis in 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we document that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Conference Board's Total Economy Database (TED) have substantially revised their measures of hours worked over time. Relying on the data used by Rogerson (2006) and Ohanian et al. (2008), we find that, for 2003, hours worked per person in Europe is 18 percent lower than hours worked in the United States. Using the 2016 releases of the same data for 2003 yields a gap that is 40 percent smaller--that is, only 11 percent lower. Using labor force survey data, which are less subject to data revisions, we find a Europe-U.S. hours gap of -19 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a model of labor supply change to test the sensitivity of static results and estimate the speed of labor supply response to discrepancies between actual and desired hours of work. The dynamic methodology indicates a high wage elasticity. This elasticity is positive and significantly different from zero. The similarity of coefficient estimates for level variables obtained from the cross-section and the cross-section of changes formulation suggests that bias problems are not severe in the traditional approach.

The article illustrates the sensitivity of estimates of the effects and costs of a wage subsidy on assumptions regarding labor market demand and supply conditions. An hourly wage subsidy will cause market wage rates to be bid down and manhours demanded or number of workers employed to be increased if labor supply functions are positively sloped. Meanwhile, these conclusions are reversed if supply is backward-bending. The wage subsidy can be an inefficient transfer device depending on elasticity conditions. Transfer efficiency is lowest in markets in which a wage subsidy is most likely to be effected.

Previous research has shown that labour supply – especially of partnered women with supplemental incomes – is positively associated with homeownership status. This literature is advanced by testing whether wanting to move into homeownership before the actual entry into homeownership affects individuals’ labour supply in couples. The empirical analysis is based on longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2008). Fixed-effects panel regression models are used to predict the labour supply of women and men separately. Labour supply changes associated with homeownership are found to mainly occur when individuals want to move into homeownership and prior to the actual entry into homeownership. When wanting to move into homeownership, women and men increase their labour supply, where women are more likely to take up work and men to increase work hours. For women, the association between wanting to move into homeownership and labour supply is moderated by regional house price changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a computable overlapping generations model economy to analyze the quantitative effects of some reforms on tax and transfer programs, aimed at easing the tax burden on the labor supply of older workers. We focus on retirement behavior, work hours over the life cycle, and efficiency gains. We find that the labor supply of older workers is very responsive to changes in tax and transfer programs and show that the gains, in terms of old-age work hours, are non-trivial. However, we also find that longer careers may not substantially increase aggregate hours because workers may reallocate labor supply over the life cycle in response to retiring later. Moreover, since longer careers may also reduce saving rates, we also find that changes in tax and transfer programs aimed at boosting the employment rates of the elderly may reduce output per head. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's response to comment on his article on hours of labor. The overtime pay arrangement is interpreted as an expression of the inelasticity of the individual's supply curve with respect to income for a significant range of straight-time rates in the zone above some going wage. In referring to the consumption content of leisure, it is stressed that to enjoy the leisure one has to work more to fill the leisure time with goods and services. The paucity of empirical evidence regarding the individual and market labor supply schedule in the very short run is not satisfactory.

Declining work force participation rates are a potentially important public policy issue for governments in countries with large capital inflows. Here we consider remittances as both a household and individual characteristic to estimate the impact of this nonwage transfer on labor supply decisions in Honduras. Although an initial view suggests moderate reductions across the working-age population, we find evidence of increased participation through a reallocation of labor time across work categories. Our inclusion of the individual nature of remittance reception suggests less emphasis on the unified household perspective is warranted. ( JEL O15, O12, J29) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to unexplore the area of information and communication technology (ICT) use in organizations related to the assumed productivity gains by the use of ICTs. On the one hand, the paper focus on the losses of labor time that are caused by malfunctioning hardware or non-functional software, and on the other hand, the paper focus on the labor time losses that are caused by a lack of skills to maximize ICT. Design/methodology/approach – To estimate these losses, the paper conducted a large-scale survey among the Dutch workforce. The respondents were presented scenarios, and then they were asked to assess the loss of labor time. Findings – When working with ICTs, malfunctioning ICT and ICT skill insufficiencies lead to a loss in labor time of 7.5 percent. The losses increase with decreasing educational attainment level. Age does not contribute to the total average losses. Workers highly underestimate the effects of ICT-related training. The role of co-workers is more significant than the formally organized means by the organization. Originality/value – Due to ICT's significance among the labor force, investigating the reported losses is an important step to further improve the use of ICTs in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a systematic way of examining the importance of the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply in order to explain the overall movements in total hours of work over time. We show how informative bounds can be developed on each of these margins. We apply this analysis to the evolution of hours of work in the US, the UK, and France and show that both the extensive and intensive margins matter in explaining changes in total hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the role of sectoral labor productivity in explaining the process of structural transformation — the secular reallocation of labor across sectors — and the time path of aggregate productivity across countries. We measure sectoral labor productivity across countries using a model of the structural transformation. Productivity differences across countries are large in agriculture and services and smaller in manufacturing. Over time, productivity gaps have been substantially reduced in agriculture and industry but not nearly as much in services. These sectoral productivity patterns generate implications in the model that are broadly consistent with the cross-country data. We find that productivity catch-up in industry explains about 50% of the gains in aggregate productivity across countries, whereas low productivity in services and the lack of catch-up explain all the experiences of slowdown, stagnation, and decline observed across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Polis (07176554) is the property of Polis - Revista Academica Universidad Bolivariana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the explicit loss born by workers who face constraints in their working hours by analyzing differences in actual and desired hours and wages. Men tend to be underemployed while women are evenly split between over- and underemployment. Losses in surplus are generally small, but 10% of underemployed men and women experience losses of more than 34% or 50% of surplus, respectively. The loss measure is also an important determinant in predicting labor market transitions, meaning increases in surplus losses generate a higher probability of changing from workers’ present jobs or changing the number of hours. ( JEL J22, J41) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the theoretical justifications available for policies of flexible labour markets (FLMs) in reducing the level of unemployment in developed economies. It empirically assesses the OECD's rationalisation of policy linking profitability to investment and job creation in four country cases. New capital investment is found to be significant for unemployment in all cases but it is not found to be a consequence of the mechanistic achievement of 'normal' profits. Without an empirically supported mechanism for how FLMs reduce unemployment, the policy is open to the accusation of being no more than a political tool for altering distribution, without concern for the wider socio-economic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author finds evidence of a downward-sloping labor supply curve for urban areas in Peru from cross-sectional household data for 2002 and pooled data for available years from 1985 to 2000. Individuals respond to lower hourly earnings with an increase in the quantity supplied of work hours. This behavior would help to explain the increasing trend in average work hours in Peru (this average for male workers in Lima, the capital city, rose from 50.5 to 53.9 weekly hours between 1985 and 2000; meanwhile, 33.4% of workers had weekly schedules above 60 hours in 2002). Another finding is the increase in hours supplied due to pressure from the more numerous cohorts recently entering the Peruvian labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Theoretical models of the antecedents and outcomes of work–home interference (WHI) suggest that work characteristics (e.g., job stressors, working hours) increase the probability that an individual experiences work–home interference. Since work–home interference is considered as a role stressor, these experiences should be detrimental for long-term well-being. In this 2-wave panel study, the authors compared this suggested pathway with competing models that propose reverse causation and reciprocal effects in a sample of 365 employees (N at T2=130) from the German workforce using structural equation modeling. In particular, a model with two proposed antecedents (job stressors, working hours) of WHI and two proposed consequences (depression, turnover motivation) was analyzed in alternative configurations. The results support a cyclical model with a job stressors→depression→WHI→job stressors pathway. Furthermore, working hours affected WHI, and turnover motivation emerged as an outcome of WHI. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The economic contribution of children to their parents' households has long interested demographers because of its potential to influence fertility levels. Valuing children's labour in pre-industrial economies, however, is inherently difficult. The same is true of women's labour, a crucial component of any analysis of net production. Here we use Mead Cain's seminal study (Population and Development Review 3(3): 201-227, 1977) of children's economic contributions in a Bangladeshi village to illustrate these points. We combine Cain's data on landless women's and men's hours of work with data on the efficiency per hour of work from other pre-industrial settings (Mueller, Population and Development: The Search for Selective Interventions. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 98-153, 1976; Kramer, Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 1998). When women's labour is incorporated, we find that the Bangladeshi children begin to produce as much as they consume by ages 10 (girls) or 11 (boys). Despite these productive contributions, neither women nor men 'pay' for their cumulative consumption until their early 20s. We believe our methods could be usefully applied in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late-nineteenth century, Australia had one of the highest levels of income per capita in the world. Over the twentieth century, Australia's exceptional position declined as its high labour force participation rate and male-skewed gender ratio gradually aligned with other countries. A similar reversion occurred in the other important components underlying Australia's high productivity, such as work hours. As the structure of the economy shifted away from a reliance on agricultural and towards manufacturing, Australia's protective attitude and restrictive business practices may have exacerbated its loss in productivity. Considerable research remains to be carried out to confirm these views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper brings a historical perspective to debates on worktime differences across OECD countries, exploiting new data sets on hours of work per week, and days and hours of work per year between 1870 and 2000. We contest the popular view that the divergence in worktimes between Europe and North America and Australia is a recent phenomenon. Since 1870 the decline in weekly and annual hours was consistently greater in the Old World; the New World has had fewer days off for the last 130years. Labor power and inequality, held to be important determinants of worktime after 1970, had comparable effects in the period before 1913. We find that given their levels of income in 1870 New World workers supplied relatively too many hours of work. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Market work per person of working age differs widely across the OECD countries and there have been some significant changes in the last forty years. How to explain this pattern? Taxes are part of the story but much remains to be explained. The story favoured by Alesina et al. (2005) is that the nexus of strong unions, generous welfare and social democracy implies both high taxes and pressure in favour of work-sharing in response to adverse shocks. This is not borne out in Scandinavian countries. Scandinavian trade unions have understood that wage restraint rather than work-sharing is the way to sustain employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the Health and Retirement Study indicate that hours constraints are a common feature of jobs held by workers nearing retirement. We present a simple model that predicts that workers who are not free to lower their usual hours of work should be more likely than their unconstrained counterparts to retire by some future date. Our estimates, which are robust to various specifications, support this prediction. The amount by which being hours constrained is estimated to raise retirement probabilities is nearly as large as the effect of being in relatively poor health, suggesting an economically significant effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographic shifts mean that workers will increasingly face challenges of caring for ill or disabled family members. The authors use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women to assess whether employed women are more likely to leave the labor force when they start care work and whether access to workplace policies alters these patterns. They found that, as with earlier cohorts, employed women are more likely to leave the labor force after they start care work. Workers in jobs that provide access to flexible hours, unpaid family leave, and paid sick or vacation days are more likely to remain employed and maintain work hours over a two-year period, but access to job benefits has little impact on women's distress. Although most policies do not provide additional benefits for employed caregivers than for other workers, unpaid family leave does increase their employment retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In tax microsimulation models which predict labour supply using a probabilistic discrete hours approach, the analysis of the distribution of income is difficult because, even for a small sample with a modest range of labour supply points, the range of possible combinations over the sample is extremely large. This paper demonstrates the use of a pseudo income distribution, where the probability of a particular labour supply value occurring (standardised by the population size) is used to refer to a particular position in the pseudo income distribution. The superior performance of the pseudo approach compared to using the expected income or taking few draws from the possible set of distributions is illustrated by a simulation example for sole parents in Australia, in which the whole social security system is abolished. The example shows further that even if sole parents could move freely into the labour force, they do not manage to compensate fully or even close to fully for their loss of income when no benefit payments are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the differences in work and leisure between the United States and Western Europe. While hours worked per person were about the same between in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s, today they are almost fifty percent less in Europe than in the U.S. Academics and policymakers have begun to focus on Europe's decline of work hours. Policymakers want to know if the decline has led to a slowdown in growth. The article looks to explore the evolution of working hours while it looks at Edward Prescott's work on labor differences between the U.S. and Europe and examines two different hypotheses for the mismatch between macro and micro labor supply estimates.

We analyze the technology shocks identified by two different structural VAR models and compare them with classical and refined Solow residuals. The measures of technology are reasonably highly correlated. Alternative identifying restrictions in the VARs, however, have different theoretical as well as empirical consequences for the technology shocks. King et al.'s (1991) model and the classical Solow residual capture a mixture of technology and labor supply shocks, whereas the technology shocks from Galí's model and the refined Solow residuals are robust to the latter phenomenon. Moreover, we find that the two robust measures of technology are negatively correlated with hours worked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past 60 years, the number of hours worked per person in the U.S. has changed very little. Nonetheless, the labor force has undergone some pronounced shifts over that same period. One prominent change is the sharp increase in the number of hours worked by married women. In this article, Aubhik Khan discusses how the composition of the labor force has changed since 1945 and how macroeconomists explain these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes implications for worker well-being if legislation in the U.S. Congress is passed permitting employers and non-supervisory employees who agree to substitute future compensatory time off in lieu of premium pay for overtime work, calculated over an 80-hour two-week standard. The impact on worker welfare is predicted applying augmented worker utility and employer demand for hours functions. Plausible inter-temporal scenarios suggest that unless workers gain more control over the timing of their overtime and comp time hours, they are likely to experience a net loss in welfare. This will occur to the extent employers use the new overtime regulation to vary work hours and schedules more closely with fluctuations in output demand as opposed to better customizing work hours to fit workers' needs to balance work with competing demands on their time, that is, adopting a short rather than longer-run time horizon regarding the restraint of labor costs, Alternative policies are more likely to raise welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant differences exist in actual and preferred work hours by race. Specifically, black males work 20 percent fewer annual hours than white males. The differences between black and white women are small. Black workers are significantly more likely than white workers to prefer additional work and fewer are satisfied with their current hours of work. I use the hours-inequality hypothesis of Bell and Freeman (1995, 1997) to evaluate the extent to which race differences in work hours and hours preferences are related to race differences in incentives, I demonstrate that whereas white workers work longer hours in response to overall wage variation in their relevant labor market cell, black workers react to the wage variation among black workers but not to the variation overall. The fact that labor market incentives are different for otherwise similar black and white workers is difficult to reconcile with standard competitive theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes three trends in working time in the United States over the last thirty years. First, we document an increasing bifurcation of working time, with growth evident among those working both long and short hours. An international comparison also shows that the United States stands out as having among the highest percentage of workers putting in 50 hours per week or more. Second, we argue that there is a mismatch between working time and the preferences of American workers. On average, those working very long hours express a desire to work less, while those working short hours prefer to work more. Third, we maintain that the sense of being overworked stems primarily from demographic shifts in the labor force rather than from changes in average working time per se. Even in the absence of a dramatic rise in time spent on the job. the growth in the proportion of American households consisting of dual-earner couples and single parents has created a growing percentage of workers who face heightened time pressures and increased conflicts between work and their private lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the critical analysis of the framework conventionally used to model hours of work. Description of the actual labor market; Advantages of a labor services function that includes overtime and normal time workers; Mitigation of normal hours reduction with by compensating changes in working practices.

The article explores the impact of the individual's use of time on labor supply. It notes that utility attainment depends on the individual's wage income and leisure time. It mentions that the inclusion of transactions time affects the elasticity of the wage rate of individual labor supply. It also emphasizes that an income tax rate increase as a sales tax income based on the behavior of the individual in allocating time to labor time and to non-market time.

Duménil, Foley and Lévy (DFL)'s note gives a formal presentation of the ‘New Interpretation’ that explicitly considers the issue of heterogeneous labour. It clarified some issues raised in my previous paper. Unfortunately, however, DFL offer only a mathematical formalism while leaving the most important question unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]