Who wants to work more? Revisiting the decline in average hours worked

Clémence Berson and Marco Weißler

Economic Bulletin Boxes, 2025, vol. 3

Abstract: Average hours worked (AHW) have been declining in recent years, falling particularly strongly during the pandemic before returning to trend. This box examines the key drivers behind the decline in AHW, with two factors playing a dominant role. First, the proportion of employees working zero hours during the reference week spiked during the pandemic – owing to the closure of businesses and higher sick leave rates – and recovered only slowly. Second, the proportion of employees working very long hours has continued to fall over the past decade. JEL Classification: J22

Keywords: Average hours worked; labour supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//press/economic-bulletin ... 3~6f0a204c57.en.html (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecb:ecbbox:2025:0003:3

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Bulletin Boxes from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().