Different but Equal: Total Work, Gender and Social Norms in the EU and US Time Use

Michael Burda, Daniel Hamermesh and Philippe Weil

SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL

Abstract: Overall, the issue of whether Europeans are lazy or Americans are crazy seems of second-order importance relative to understanding the determinants of individual behavior. Amore useful, scientific approach is to assume that underlying tastes are common to both continents, while technologies, institutions, or interpersonal influences like norms or externalities may differ and evolve differently. The fact that Americans work on weekends or more often at odd hours of the day may simply represent a bad equilibrium that no individual agent can improve upon--and would certainly not wish to deviate from, given what all others are doing. Especially if norms and other externalities are important, one should recognize that the invisible hand may lead agents to places like this.

Date: 2006-05-27
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-01053588
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in European Conference of the Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti, "Are Europeans Lazy ? Or Americans Crazy?", May 2006, Portovenere, Italy. pp.1-102

Downloads: (external link)
https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-01053588/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Different but equal: total work, gender and social norms in the EU and US time use (2008)
Working Paper: Different but Equal: Total Work, Gender and Social Norms in the EU and US Time Use (2006)
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:hal:spmain:hal-01053588

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Contact - Sciences Po Departement of Economics ().