Hours Worked in Selected OECD Countries: An Empirical Assessment

Aggregate Hours Worked in OECD Countries: New Measurement and Implications for Business Cycles

We build a dataset of quarterly hours worked for 14 OECD countries. We document that hours are as volatile as output, that a large fraction of labor adjustment takes place along the intensive margin, and that the volatility of hours relative to output has increased over time. We use these data to reassess the Great Recession and prior recessions. The Great Recession in many countries is a puzzl...

Indicator Models of Real Gdp Growth in Selected Oecd Countries

Relative Income and Hours Worked:

The so called “happiness paradox”, i.e. the non increasing long-term trends of the subjective wellbeing, has been explained by theories based on social comparisons. If such explanations are taken seriously, we have to further check whether they are consistent with the observed trends in hours worked in Western countries. Available evidence suggests that leisure time is only weakly increasing, e...

Persistence and Cycles in US Hours Worked

This paper analyses monthly hours worked in the US over the sample period 1939m1 – 2011m10 using a cyclical long memory model; this is based on Gegenbauer processes and characterised by autocorrelations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is unbounded at a non-zero frequency. The reason for choosing this specification is that the periodogram o...

Leviathan and Legislative Monopoly Power: Empirical Evidence from OECD Countries

In this paper we test the Leviathan hypothesis, focusing on the joint impact of fiscal decentralization and legislative monopoly power in the growth of the public sector. Two proxies of legislative monopoly power are considered: the control of all relevant houses by the executive party and the margin of majority. Using a dynamic panel-based error correction model on OECD member countries, we fi...