EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Keeping in Touch – A Benefit of Public Holidays

Joachim Merz and Lars Osberg

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing the utility of leisure on normal weekdays and weekends. The paper uses the variation (13 to 17) in public holidays across German Länder and the German Time Use Survey of 2001-02 to show that public holidays have beneficial impacts on social life on normal weekdays and weekends. Since these benefits are additional to the other benefits of holidays, it suggests that there is a case to be made for more public holidays.

Keywords: public holidays; social contacts; social leisure time; time allocation; time use diaries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H40 I31 J22 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/5738/1/MPRA_paper_5738.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Keeping in Touch - A Benefit of Public Holidays (2006) Downloads
Working Paper: Keeping in Touch: A Benefit of Public Holidays (2006) Downloads
Working Paper: Keeping in Touch – A Benefit of Public Holidays (2006) Downloads
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:pra:mprapa:5738

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:5738