TY - JOUR AU - Alesina, Alberto AU - Glaeser, Edward L AU - Sacerdote, Bruce TI - Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11278 PY - 2005 Y2 - April 2005 DO - 10.3386/w11278 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11278 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11278.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Alberto F. Alesina E-Mail: *NA user is deceased Edward L. Glaeser Department of Economics 315A Littauer Center Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/495-0575 Fax: 617/495-7730 E-Mail: eglaeser@harvard.edu Bruce Sacerdote 6106 Rockefeller Hall Department of Economics Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 03755-3514 Tel: 603/646-2121 Fax: 603/646-2122 E-Mail: Bruce.I.Sacerdote@dartmouth.edu M1 - published as Alberto F. Alesina, Edward L. Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote. "Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different?," in Mark Gertler and Kenneth Rogoff, editors, "NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2005, Volume 20" MIT Press (2006) AB - Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these differences result from higher European tax rates, but the vast empirical labor supply literature suggests that tax rates can explain only a small amount of the differences in hours between the U.S. and Europe. Another popular view is that these differences are explained by long-standing European "culture," but Europeans worked more than Americans as late as the 1960s. In this paper, we argue that European labor market regulations, advocated by unions in declining European industries who argued "work less, work all" explain the bulk of the difference between the U.S. and Europe. These policies do not seem to have increased employment, but they may have had a more society-wide influence on leisure patterns because of a social multiplier where the returns to leisure increase as more people are taking longer vacations. ER -