The Effect of Working Hours on Health

Inés Berniell and Jan Bietenbeck

No 10524, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Does working time causally affect workers' health? We study this question in the context of a French reform which reduced the standard workweek from 39 to 35 hours, at constant earnings. Our empirical analysis exploits variation in the adoption of this shorter workweek across employers, which is mainly driven by institutional features of the reform and thus exogenous to workers' health. Difference-in-differences and lagged dependent variable regressions reveal a negative effect of working hours on self-reported health and positive effects on smoking and body mass index, though the latter is imprecisely estimated. Results are robust to accounting for endogenous job mobility and differ by workers' occupations.

Keywords: working hours; health; smoking; BMI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Published - revised version published in: Economics and Human Biology, 2020, 39, 100901

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Related works:
Journal Article: The effect of working hours on health (2020)
Working Paper: The Effect of Working Hours on Health (2018)
Working Paper: The Effect of Working Hours on Health (2017)
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