Hours Reductions as Work-Sharing

Hours of Work

Employment and Hours of Work

This paper develops a dynamic model of the labor market in which the degree of substitution between employment and hours of work is determined as part of a search equilibrium. Each firm chooses the demand for working hours and the number of vacancies, and the hourly wage rate is determined by Nash bargaining. A firm increases the demand for hours as recruitment becomes more costly. Labor market...

Reduced work hours: who benefits?

Many countries in the Western hemisphere now impose limitations on hours of work on medical staff. In the United States, a change resulted from the investigations that followed the death of Libby Zion in 1984, an 18-year-old daughter of an attorney and journalist in a New York hospital.3 Although an investigating committee found no doctor directly liable, they thought that resident’s deprivatio...

Job Search, Hours Restrictions and Desired Hours of Work

We present a structural empirical job search model in which job offers are characterized by a wage rate and the length of the working week. The unemployed accept a job if the direct utility leve1 of the wage-hours combination is higher than the reservation utility level. The latter is determined by the direct utility of being unemployed (depending on the value of leisure and the benefit level) ...

Sharing the Burden of GHG Reductions

The G8 countries propose a goal of a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050, in an effort that needs to take account of other agreements specifying that developing countries are to be provided with incentives to action and protected from the impact of measures taken by others. To help inform international negotiations of measures to achieve these goals we develop a technique for endogenously...