The importance and challenges of measuring work hours

Jay Stewart and Harley Frazis
Additional contact information
Harley Frazis: Bureau of Labor Statistics, USA

IZA World of Labor, 2019, No 95v2, 95

Abstract: Work hours are key components in estimating productivity growth and hourly wages as well as being a useful cyclical indicator in their own right, so measuring them correctly is important. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collects data on work hours in several surveys and publishes four widely used series that measure average weekly hours. The series tell different stories about average weekly hours and trends in those hours but qualitatively similar stories about the cyclical behavior of work hours. The research summarized here explains the differences in levels, but only some of the differences in trends.

Keywords: hours of work; household surveys; establishment surveys; time-use surveys; productivity; hourly wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 E23 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/95/pdfs/impor ... uring-work-hours.pdf (application/pdf)
https://wol.iza.org/articles/importance-and-challenges-of-measuring-work-hours (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: The importance and challenges of measuring work hours (2014)
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:iza:izawol:journl:2019:n:95

Access Statistics for this article

IZA World of Labor is currently edited by Pierre Cahuc

More articles in IZA World of Labor from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ().