The Twenty-four Hour Economy or Rolled-up Sidewalks: Trends in Work Timing and Their Causes
We demonstrate nearly steady trends from 1973-2023 in the U.S. in the timing of when people work for pay, away from evening and night hours toward “usual” daytime hours. The trend is related to changes in rising educational attainment, to increased real incomes, and the increased wage premium for undesirable work times—evenings and nights—that we document. The trend exists in all major industries except retail, in which changes in technology biased work away from daytime hours. The trend was accelerated by the sharp increase in telework that occurred after the Covid pandemic, an increase that was especially concentrated during daytime hours. While we observe the same phenomenon in France from 1966 to 2010, we do not in the U.K. from 1974-2015, arguably because of the very sharp decline in unionization in the U.K. and the changes in retailing.
Daniel S. Hamermesh is an economist whose research has concentrated on time use, labor demand, discrimination, academic labor markets and unusual applications of labor economics (to beauty, sleep and suicide). He authored Labor Demand, The Economics of Work and Pay, Economics Is Everywhere, Beauty Pays, Spending Time and a wide array of articles in labour economics in the leading general and specialized economics journals.
