published as 'Where did the time go? The effects of China's two-day weekend policy on labor supply, household work, and wage' in: China Economic Review, 2024, 83, 102107.
This paper examines the effects of working time reduction policy on labour supply (hours of work and whether an individual takes a second job) and household production, by exploiting the Chinese Two-Day Weekend Policy, which effectively reduced weekly working days from six to five in May 1995, as a natural experiment. We construct a theoretical model that predicts a decline in labour supply in both private and public sectors as work hours were reduced. In theory, the time spent on household production may increase or decrease or the time spent on the second job may increase or decrease depending on how much agents care about household production or the income from a second job.
Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we adopt a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the policy effects on work hours of wage earners in both public and private sectors. Relative to the control group deemed unaffected by the policy change, our estimates show that the Two-Day Weekend Policy significantly reduced the working hours of wage earners by 4 percent and the public sector by 5 percent while increasing the probability of having a second job by 3 percent and reducing the time spent on household work by 98-107 minutes per week. The results are robust to different specifications and a propensity score matching technique.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.