published in: World Economy, 2017, 40 (9), 1708-1717
Prescott (2004) argues that Europeans work much less than Americans because of higher taxes and that they would gain significantly by charging US taxes and working as much as Americans. I argue that the opposite may be true and that Americans work more than Europeans due to a coordination failure. Studies show that utility falls with other people's income, a negative externality that is internalized in Europe through laws on the minimum amount of vacation time (and maximum hours of work), something unthinkable in the US. Thus, Americans may be stuck in an "overworking trap" and would gain by working less.
A simple model and data on work time are used to obtain an estimate of the US welfare gain from reducing its work time to Europe's level. On the other hand, if neither EU nor US work time is optimal, then the sign of the EU-to-US welfare difference is positive (ambiguous) if EU work time is greater (smaller) than the optimum, while simulations show that even in the latter case, EU welfare is greater than US welfare if, relative to the optimum, the EU work 'shortage' is smaller than the US work 'surplus'.
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.