In Australia, and in other countries, we observe at any one time a wide distribution of hours worked per week. We develop a cost-minimising model to explain employer choices over the number of employees and their hours of work. An important finding is that hours of work and the number of employees are not perfect substitutes. We show that this has important implications for the way economists model labour demand and measure productivity. We show that estimates using total hours worked as the measure of labour input implicitly assumes perfect substitution of persons and hours and results, inter alia, in an overestimation of the rate of labour and multifactor productivity growth in Australia and especially in the period prior to the so called ‘productivity slow-down’.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Length: 33 pages Date of creation: 2007 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:mlb:wpaper:1022
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics, The University of Melbourne, 5th Floor, Economics and Commerce Building, Victoria, 3010, Australia Phone: +61 3 8344 5289 Fax: +61 3 8344 6899 Email: Web page: http://www.economics.unimelb.edu.au More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Colemann Leong).
Find related papers by JEL classification: J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand O47 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Measurement of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Kapteyn, A. & Kalwij, A. & Zaidi, A., 2000.
"The myth of worksharing,"
Discussion Paper
23, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions: