Stable hours and varied work as aids to efficiency

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...

Hours of Work

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) ...

A delicate balance: physician work hours, patient safety, and organizational efficiency.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) recognized the importance of housestaff in the provision of hospital care when it regulated housestaff duty hours to improve patient safety. ACGME intended to create a better balance between the management of resident fatigue and the continuity of patient care, but the shorter hours mandated by duty hour reform have created more f...

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...