Labor Market Effects of Workweek Restrictions: Evidence from the Great Depression

Price Fishback, Chris Vickers and Nicolas L. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2024, vol. 16, issue 4, 77-113

Abstract: We study the effects of restrictions on the length of the workweek under the President's Reemployment Agreement (PRA) of July 1933 and the National Industrial Recovery Act. We construct a model in which the equilibrium without such a workweek restriction has an inefficiently low level of employment. We find that employment rose by about 24 percent in the month following the imposition of the workweek restriction. Industries with longer workweeks pre-PRA experienced 9.4 percent faster growth in hourly earnings post-PRA, but this increase was not sufficient to prevent a relative fall in weekly earnings in these industries.

JEL-codes: E24 E32 J22 J31 N12 N31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mac.20220188 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.3886/E191661V1 (text/html)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mac.20220188.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mac.20220188.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aejmac:v:16:y:2024:i:4:p:77-113

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/mac.20220188

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics is currently edited by Simon Gilchrist

More articles in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().