Why Do Overtime Work, Overtime Compensation and the Distribution of Economic Well-Being Evidence for the West Germany and Great Britain

Markus Pannenberg and Gert Wagner

No 318, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using panel data for West Germany and Great Britain, we show that there are striking differences in overtime work and overtime compensation in the two countries in the 1990s. Our estimates reveal that the observed overtime patterns affect both the evolution of the monthly labour earnings distribution and individual economic well-being differently in West Germany and Great Britain. Besides varying labour market institutions in the two countries a higher incidence of a combination of performance-related pay and unpaid overtime in Great Britain is an important factor in explaining the observed differences. With regards to West Germany, we show that the current policy of transforming paid overtime in "working time accounts", which is conducted in the spirit of "work-sharing", is neither beneficial for employed workers in terms of income mobility, nor in terms of overall job satisfaction nor in terms of working time preferences.

Keywords: Overtime; wage inequality; economic well-being; semi-parametric; decomposition technique; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 J23 J31 J33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2001-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp318.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:dp318

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers 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 Holger Hinte ().