Does working time causally affect workers' health? We study this question in the context of a French reform which reduced the standard workweek from 39 to 35 hours, at constant earnings. Our empirical analysis exploits variation in the adoption of this shorter workweek across employers, which is mainly driven by institutional features of the reform and thus arguably exogenous to workers' health. Difference-indifferences and lagged dependent variable regressions reveal a positive effect of working hours on smoking and a negative effect on self-reported health. Results are robust to accounting for endogenous job mobility and differ by workers' occupations.
Evidence from Internet-Search Behavior in 11 Countries* * *We are grateful to Sonia Bhalotra and Renata Cuk for helpful discussion. We thank Alejo Isacch and Julián Pedrazzi for excellent research assistance. Facchini gratefully acknowledges financial support from the General Secretariat for Research-Government of Catalonia (SGR2017-1301) and the Spanish Ministry of Education (PID2019-104619RB-C43). Views expressed here do not necessarily correspond to those of our affiliations.
We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Our main contributions are: (i) providing new and comparable evidence on the effects of motherhood on labour outcomes in developing countries; (ii) exploring the possible mechanisms driving these outcomes; (iii) discussing the potential links between child penalty and the prevailing gender norms and family policies in the region. We find that motherhood reduces women’s labour supply in the extensive and intensive margins and influences female occupational structure towards flexible occupations—part-time work, self-employment, and labour informality—needed for family–work balance. Furthermore, countries with more conservative gender norms and less generous family policies are associated with larger differences between mothers’ and non-mothers’ labour market outcomes.
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