Why Do Americans No Longer Work So Much More Than Non-Americans?

Serdar Birinci, Loukas Karabarbounis and Kurt See

No 813, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: In the 1990s, Americans used to work much more than non-Americans. Nowadays, about half of the gap in hours worked has reversed. To evaluate the convergence of working hours, we develop a tractable model of labor supply enriched with multiple sources of heterogeneity across individuals, an extensive margin of participation, multi-member households, and an elaborate system of taxes and benefits upon nonemployment. Using detailed measurements from micro-level and aggregate datasets, we identify model parameters and sources of heterogeneity across individuals for various countries. We run a horse race between competing explanations and find that U.S. hours per person declined after 2000 owing mainly to the rise of government health benefits provided to the non-employed. Non-U.S. countries have generous benefits for the non-employed, but this generosity has not changed as much over time as in the United States, and public health coverage does not depend on employment status or income levels. For these countries, the rise of labor supply is generally accounted for by a mix of factors, such as the rise of wages and the falling disutility of work.

Keywords: Wages; Benefits; Hours; Employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E60 H53 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-25
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp813.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp813.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://researchdatabase.minneapolisfed.org/downloads/3f462563w)

Related works:
Working Paper: Why Do Americans No Longer Work So Much More Than Non-Americans? (2026)
Working Paper: Why Do Americans No Longer Work So Much More Than Non-Americans? (2026)
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:fip:fedmwp:103293

DOI: 10.21034/wp.813

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().