Search results for ""Author Daniel S. Hamermesh""

Time is the ultimate scarce resource and thus quintessentially a topic for economics, ths study of scarcity. Starting with the observation that time is increasingly valuable given competing demands as we have more things we can buyand do, Spending Time provides engaging insights into how people use their time and what determines their decisions about spending their time. That our time is limited by the number of hours in a day, days in a year, and years in our lives means that we face constraints and thus choices that involve trade-offs. We sleep, eat, have fun, watch TV, and not least we work. How much we dedicate to each, and why we do so, is intriguining and no one is better placed to shed light on similarities and differences than Daniel S. Hamermesh, the leading authority on time-use. Here he explores how people use their time, including across countries, regions, cultures, class, and gender. Americans now work more than people in other rich countries, but as recently as the late 1970s they worked no more than others; and they also work longer into older age. Men and women do different things at different times of the day, which affects how well-off they feel. Both the arrival of children and retirement create major shocks to existing time uses, with differences between the sexes. Higher incomes and higher wage rates lead people to hurry more, both on and off the job, and higher wage rates lead people to cut back on activities that take time away from work. Being stressed for time is central to modern life, and Hamermesh shows who is rushed, and why. With Americans working more than people in France, Germany, the U.K., Japan and other rich countries, the book offers a simple but radical proposal for changing Americans' lives and reducing the stress about time.

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This important book presents in one volume the most important articles and papers on three key issues in modern labor economics: the dynamics of labour demand, the related adjustment costs, and the effects of employment security policies.The poor employment performance of many of the industrialized countries in the 1970s and '80s has led to a dramatic growth of interest in the dynamics of labor demand and an outpouring of related policy initiatives in the European Community. In the United States, the erosion of the employment-at-will doctrine promises to arouse a similar growth of interest. This comprehensive reference collection brings together the seminal papers in this field, showing how the theory of labour demand dynamics and empirical analysis can be linked to the study of job security policies and their consequences.Dynamic Labor Demand and Adjustment Costs will be an invaluable resource for students of microeconomics, labour economics and macroeconomics, as well as policy analysts concerned with job security and employment.

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Beginning in 1965 Nobel Laureate Gary Becker realized that shadow prices, which reflect the value of one’s time, may be at least as important as money prices. Implications of his resulting theory of time allocation were not tested until much later when governments began to collect extensive data on how individuals utilized their time. Time Use in Economics contains original research on new aspects of time use compiled by Daniel S. Hamermesh, a long-time path-breaking labor economist leader in analyzing time use data, and Solomon W. Polachek, a pioneer in gender-related labor market research. Topics include how time is used by type of household, how time is used in particular jobs, how time is used in high versus low growth geographic areas, how time is used after a job loss, how time use affects individual wellbeing, as well as how to interpret the blurred boundaries of time use between leisure and work, a growing issue as more individuals, especially mothers, work from home.

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