The Twenty-four Hour Economy or Rolled-up Sidewalks: Trends in Work Timing and Their Causes

Jeff Biddle () and Daniel Hamermesh ()
Additional contact information
Jeff Biddle: University of Notre Dame
Daniel Hamermesh: University of Texas at Austin

No 18593, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We demonstrate nearly steady trends from 1973-2023 in the U.S. in the timing of when people work for pay, away from evening and night hours toward “usual†daytime hours. Much of the trend is related to increased real incomes, with rising educational attainment, the changing composition of the (declining) manufacturing industry, and the increased wage premium for undesirable work times - evenings and nights - that we document accounting for the rest. The trend exists in all major industries except retail, in which changes in technology biased work away from daytime hours. It was accelerated by the sharp increase in telework that occurred after the Covid pandemic, an increase that was especially concentrated during daytime hours. While we observe the same phenomenon in France from 1966 to 2010, we do not in the U.K. from 1974-2015, arguably because of the very sharp decline in unionization in the U.K. and the changes in retailing.

Keywords: work timing; Covid; time use; home work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18593.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp18593

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().