Hours Worked in the US and Europe: Different Data, Different Answers

This paper constructs estimates of hours worked per person, employment rates and hours worked per employed on the aggregate level and broken down by demographic groups in the US and 18 European countries for the time period 1983 through 2011. We recur to three different micro data sets, describe in detail how to make the data sets consistent internationally and over time. We compare them to aggregate data from the OECD and the Conference Board (CB). These are the standard sources used by economists so far, but are in contrast to our data based on different type of data sources for different countries which potentially impede cross-sectional comparability. Based on our data, Europeans work on average 18 percent less hours than US citizens during the time period 2003 to 2007, compared to 13 percent based on OECD data and only 7 percent based on CB data. Matching/replicating these larger differences would be a harder challenge for the literature. However, our data predict a similar country ranking and a slightly smaller cross-sectional variation within Europe than the two other data sources. We further use our data to quantify by how much cross-country differences in the demographic structure, employment rates, weeks worked per year and weekly hours worked per employed, contribute to the cross-country differences in aggregate hours worked per person.