Trends in Hours Worked across Countries: Evidence using Micro Data

Nicola Fuchs-Schuendeln, Bettina Brueggemann and Alexander Bick
Additional contact information
Bettina Brueggemann: Goethe University Frankfurt
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Bettina Brüggemann

No 107, 2013 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We use three different micro data sets, the European Labor Force Survey, the Current Population Survey, and the German Microcensus, to obtain annual hours worked for various demographic subgroups in the US and 18 European countries. One major difficulty in constructing annual hours from micro data sets is the fact that hours are only reported for selected reference weeks, which are not distributed evenly over the year. As a consequence, hours lost due to public holidays or annual leave are mis-measured. Consequently, we use external data sources to account for these hours. We compare the generated time series of aggregate annual hours worked to the data series provided by the OECD and the Conference Board. In 29 out of 38 cases, average deviations amount to less than 10 percent, in 20 out of 38 cases to less than 5 percent. It is worthwhile pointing out that there are also non-negligible differences between the OECD and the Conference Board. We also decompose hours worked in an intensive and an extensive margin, and compare both to OECD and Conference Board data, as well as checking internal consistency of different possible extensive margin definitions. Finally, we document a set of stylized facts on hours worked (conditional on working and unconditional) over time and across countries for different demographic subgroups distinguished by marital status, gender, and age.

Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2013/paper_107.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:red:sed013:107

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().