In Search of Working Time? Hours Constraints, Firms and Mobility
This paper focuses on hours constraints, 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, I decompose the hours gap between constrained and unconstrained workers. Occupational sorting explains most of the variation for involuntary part-time workers, concentrated in low-skilled jobs. Firm-specific organizational factors prove decisive in the full-time sample, with constrained workers disproportionately employed in low-wage and low-hour firms. Second, I exploit the panel dimension of my linked data to study mobilities of hour-constrained workers. These workers move more across firms and increase their hours, but do not achieve significant gains in earnings due to negative wage effects.
When Workers Don’t Know Their Contract: Evidence from French Working Time Regulations
This paper examines workers’ awareness of their contractual working time arrangements and its consequences for labor market outcomes. Combining administrative and survey data at the individual level, we construct a new and unique data set which shows that 20% of the workforce mistakenly think 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 do not know the legal environment governing something as fundamental as their working time. We show that these “ignorant” 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 total compensation is similar. Complementary results on job satisfaction also suggest that firms do not take advantage of their workers’ ignorance of labor contracts to extract rents. Rather, “ignorant” workers appear to benefit from an intermediate status between standard hours contracts and day contracts with more flexibility. Leveraging the panel dimension of our data, we further show that these workers are more likely to sign actual day contracts over time, but with smaller effects on their earnings’ trajectories.
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. I combine panel administrative data with survey information on hours constraints 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
Le Développement des Nouveaux Indépendants Est-Il un Facteur de Tension sur le Marché du Travail Salarié ?
with Philippe Askenazy and Christine Erhel, Connaissance de l’Emploi n°203, December 2024.