In Search of Working Time? Hours Constraints and Firms [Draft available upon request]
This paper focuses on hours constraints, the barriers for employees to work their preferred number of hours at a given wage rate. While previous research has often depicted these constraints as related to firm-specific hours policies, little evidence exists to support this view as data on constraints remain scarce. Exploiting a unique feature of the French Labor Force Survey, I link the majority of workers reporting their constraints to panel administrative data and provide new insights regarding the role of firms in hours constraints. First, relying on a decomposition approach, I confirm that occupational sorting explains the majority of variation in constraint probability, while further demonstrating that firm sorting accounts for 73% of the remaining variation. Within constraining jobs, I identify a significant hours gap between constrained and unconstrained workers, sometimes in the same firm, and investigate potential mechanisms driving this disparity. Second, I exploit the panel dimension of my linked data to study labor market transitions of constrained workers. I observe a higher probability to move across employers for constrained workers. When such transitions occur, these workers experience larger increases in hours worked and consequently higher earnings, as the effect on hourly wages remains flat.
When Workers Don’t Know Their Rights: Evidence from French Working Time Regulations (with T. Breda and V. Pecheu)
90% of French workers have a working contract stipulating a given number of hours of work per week. Their employer has the duty to control these hours and if workers do overtime, overtime hours must be paid. The remaining 10% of the French workforce are paid per working day. This means that they have to work a given number of days per year, but their hours are not monitored. Employers can use the later contracts (by the day) only for high-skill workers who have strong autonomy in their job. Combining administrative and survey data at the individual level, we show that 20% of the workforce think that they are paid by the day while they are actually paid through a classic hours contract. This reveals that several workers do not know the legal environment governing something as fundamental as their working time. A first contribution is to document this phenomenon: we study the characteristics of the workers (and their firms) that are not aware of their working contract (and presumably their rights). Second, we examine if these misreporters differ from classic workers in terms of working conditions, typically whether they endorse the costs or enjoy the benefits of the flexible arrangement.
Child Penalty and Hours Constraints
A large literature has settled the existence of a child penalty, i.e the idea that the arrival of the first child creates a long-run gender gap in earnings. An important source for the child penalty lies in the differential evolution of hours worked across men and women following the birth of the child. In particular, many women tend to transition to part-time work when they have their first child and remain in such positions for a certain number of years. As their children grow up, women may yet be willing to return to their initial full-time working status. An important question concerns whether they are able to do so, reflecting on an important body of research on involuntary part-time work. In this paper, I use the pseudo-panel approach from Kleven (2024) and mobilize information on hours constraints from the French Labor Force Survey to distinguish what share of the child penalty in hours is driven by constraints, as opposed to voluntary part-time work reflecting gender norms or stronger taste for child care.
Working Papers
[in French]Le Développement des Nouveaux Indépendants Est-Il un Facteur de Tension sur le Marché du Travail Salarié ?(Does the Rise of New Independent Workers Create Strains in the Salaried Labor Market?), with P. Askenazy and C. Erhel, Connaissance de l’Emploi n°203, December 2024. Paper