Skip to main content

Lund University Publications

LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

The Effect of Working Hours on Health

Berniell, Inés and Bietenbeck, Jan LU (2017) In IZA Discussion Paper Series
Abstract
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 exogenous to workers' health. Difference-in-differences and lagged dependent variable regressions reveal a negative effect of working hours on self-reported health and positive effects on smoking and body mass index, though the latter is imprecisely estimated. Results are robust to accounting for endogenous job mobility and differ by workers' occupations.
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
and
organization
publishing date
type
Working paper/Preprint
publication status
published
subject
keywords
working hours, health, smoking, BMI, I10, I12, J22
in
IZA Discussion Paper Series
issue
10524
pages
30 pages
publisher
IZA Working paper series
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
338cd094-c6ec-47d8-8cf0-c2dc7ac17183
alternative location
http://ftp.iza.org/dp10524.pdf
date added to LUP
2017-03-16 10:54:00
date last changed
2018-11-21 21:30:44
@misc{338cd094-c6ec-47d8-8cf0-c2dc7ac17183,
  abstract     = {{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 exogenous to workers' health. Difference-in-differences and lagged dependent variable regressions reveal a negative effect of working hours on self-reported health and positive effects on smoking and body mass index, though the latter is imprecisely estimated. Results are robust to accounting for endogenous job mobility and differ by workers' occupations.}},
  author       = {{Berniell, Inés and Bietenbeck, Jan}},
  keywords     = {{working hours; health; smoking; BMI; I10; I12; J22}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Working Paper}},
  number       = {{10524}},
  publisher    = {{IZA Working paper series}},
  series       = {{IZA Discussion Paper Series}},
  title        = {{The Effect of Working Hours on Health}},
  url          = {{http://ftp.iza.org/dp10524.pdf}},
  year         = {{2017}},
}