It is ironic that many clients and lawyers now condemn hourly billing. Starting in the 1950s, both groups demanded the switch from fixed-fee billing to hourly billing. This article explains why. Using a new economic model, Professors Cloud and Shepherd show that societal changes, particularly the expansion of pretrial discovery in the 1938 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, led inevitably to hou...

This paper uses the New Zealand Linked Income Supplement (LIS) to investigate the annual transitions in hourly earnings of working age individuals over the years 1997 to 2004. I first construct transition matrices for annual changes in weekly and hourly earnings, to enable comparison with previous analyses using New Zealand tax data. I then estimate the determinants of annual changes in hourly ...

This study analyzes real wage cyclicality for male full-time workers within employer-employee matches in Germany over the period 1984–2004. Five different wage measures are compared: the standard hourly wage rate; hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus pay; the effective wage, which takes into account unpaid overtime; and monthly earnings, with and without additional pay. None of the...

I consider the optimal pricing problem faced by a freelance worker on an on-demand labor platform. Service requests arriving while the worker is busy are lost forever. Thus an hourly (or per-unit-time in general) pricing strategy appropriately captures the opportunity cost of accepting a job. With the view of improving capacity utilization in the face of arrival uncertainty, the worker may be t...

This chapter presents some results of an econometric analysis (developed in Patrick and Wolak 2001b) of customer-level demands for electricity of large and medium-sized industrial and commercial customers purchasing electricity under half-hourly spot prices and demand charges coincident with system peaks in the England and Wales (E&W) electricity market. These estimates can be used to forecast ...

The prevalence of OSAHS (obstructive sleep apnoea/hypopnoea syndrome) is high in developed countries and it is estimated that the vast majority of patients remain undiagnosed. On the basis of physiological evidence, we evaluated the frequency component of HRI (heart rate increment) as a simple and inexpensive screening tool for OSAHS detection in a first group of patients (group 1) and validate...