Hours Off the Clock
Andrew Green ()
Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies
Abstract:
To what extent do workers work more hours than they are paid for? The relationship between hours worked and hours paid, and the conditions under which employers can demand more hours �off the clock,� is not well understood. The answer to this question impacts worker welfare, as well as wage and hour regulation. In addition, work off the clock has important implications for the measurement and cyclical movement of productivity and wages. In this paper, I construct a unique administrative dataset of hours paid by employers linked to a survey of workers on their reported hours worked to measure work off the clock. Using cross-sectional variation in local labor markets, I find only a small cyclical component to work off the clock. The results point to labor hoarding rather than efficiency wage theory, indicating work off the clock cannot explain the counter-cyclical movement of productivity. I find workers employed by small firms, and in industries with a high rate of wage and hour violations are associated with larger differences in hours worked than hours paid. These findings suggest the importance of tracking hours of work for enforcement of labor regulations.
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2017-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2017/CES-WP-17-44.pdf First version, 2017 (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:cen:wpaper:17-44
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().