Can workers reach their ideal working hours over time? This paper provides novel empirical evidence on hours constraints—barriers for workers to work their desired hours at a given wage rate—by linking self-reported hour preferences from large-scale survey data with administrative employer-employee data between 2003 and 2023. Twenty percent of French salaried workers report wanting to increase their hours at their given wage. Leveraging the panel dimension of my data, I show that constrained workers switch employers more frequently and experience increases in hours and earnings through mobility. However, most constrained workers remain unable to adjust their hours to their desired level within 3 years after their report. Next, I develop a revealed preference method to quantify welfare effects associated with constraints and find that workers would on average accept a 10% reduction in hourly wages to work in a job offering their desired number of hours. These findings highlight the important role of hours worked as a job amenity in shaping labor market sorting.
Working Papers
Are Workers Who Misunderstand Their Working Contract Worse Off?
This paper examines workers’ awareness of their contractual working time arrangements and its relation with labour market outcomes. Combining administrative and survey data at the individual level, we construct a new and unique data set which shows that nearly 20% of the workforce mistakenly report that they work under day contracts, with no monitoring of hours, while they are actually paid through a standard hours contract. This reveals that many workers with various profiles may be misinformed about the legal environment governing something as fundamental as their working time. We show that these misreporting workers differ from classic workers in terms of working conditions: they perform more unpaid overtime hours but have a higher wage rate per contractual hour, so that their true compensation per hour worked is similar. This suggests that firms do not comply with formal regulations with uninformed workers but do neither take advantage of their misunderstanding to extract rents.
Le Développement des Nouveaux Indépendants Est-Il un Facteur de Tension sur le Marché du Travail Salarié ?