IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed012/710.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Hours and Occupations

Author

Listed:
  • Luisa Fuster

    (IMDEA)

  • Gueorgui Kambourov

    (University of Toronto)

  • Andres Erosa

    (IMDEA)

Abstract

There is a negative mean-dispersion relationship between the log of mean annual hours in an occupation and the standard deviation of log annual hours in that occupation. We document this pattern using data from the 1976-2011 Current Population Survey (CPS) and various Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) waves from 1984 till 2004. This pattern holds over time and across age, education, and gender groups and is observed both at the intensive (weekly hours) and extensive (number of weeks) margins. Occupations have hardly changed their position in the mean-dispersion space over the 1976-2011 time period. However, the fraction of those working in the high mean-low dispersion occupations has increased substantially, mostly due to a change in the fraction of women across these sectors. We provide a simple model which illustrates the relative importance of three mechanisms in understanding these facts and individuals' decisions to sort into different sectors (occupations) in the economy - differences in occupation-specific fixed costs of work, in the individuals' sectoral comparative advantage, and in the utility of leisure.

Suggested Citation

  • Luisa Fuster & Gueorgui Kambourov & Andres Erosa, 2012. "Hours and Occupations," 2012 Meeting Papers 710, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed012:710
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://economicdynamics.org/meetpapers/2012/paper_710.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed012:710. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Christian Zimmermann). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.