The RFBerlin Brown Bag Seminar is an informal lunchtime meet up where researchers and students present ongoing work and new ideas in a relaxed, discussion-oriented setting. Rooted in the tradition of bringing one’s own lunch in a paper-brown bag, it offers space for open exchange and constructive feedback.

This week, we welcome Gregor Jarosch a Professor of Economics at Duke University. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and Stanford University and obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2015. He is also Fellow of the RFBerlin Network and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He researches topics at the intersection of macroeconomics and labor economics.

Event Topic:

Should Friday be the New Saturday? Hours Worked and Hours Wanted

joint with Laura Pilossoph and Anthony Swaminathan

This paper investigates self-reported wedges between how much people work and how much they want to work, at their current wage. More than two-thirds of full-time workers in German survey data are overworked—usual hours exceed desired hours. We combine this evidence with a simple model of labor supply to assess the welfare consequences of tighter weekly hours limits via willingness-to-pay calculations. According to counterfactuals, the optimal length of the workweek in Germany is 37 hours. Introducing such a cap would raise welfare by .5–1% of GDP. The gains from a shortened workweek are largest for workers who are married, female, college-educated, white-collar, middle aged, and high income. An extended analysis integrates a non-constant wage-hours relationship, falling capital returns, and a shrinking tax base.

Event Details:

Participation in the seminar is limited to RFBerlin members and researchers from affiliated institutions. External researchers who are interested in attending are kindly asked to contact the events manager Yulia Aster at [email protected]